Distributed urban parameters now considered in WRF4.6

The Weather Research & Forecasting model (WRF) is the most widely used weather model for investigating regional climate. It uses the process of dynamical downscaling to improve spatio-temporal resolutions of coarse (100km~, 6-hours) global climate models. It is not simple interpolation, but it utilizes a couple of physical models that represents the geophysical processes on earth.

Since before 2015, our research group (GUC lab and Kanda laboratory) has been improving the model to consider representative spatial distributions of urban parameters needed to model the weather accurately in cities. We usually download WRF and make local versions for research. It is our goal to have our models freely used by other researchers.

Thanks to the talented Dr. Do Ngoc Khanh, he has succeeded in communicating and sharing our version with the main WRF developers. Through his efforts, our version is now added as an option for various users. Users of WRF Version 4.6 will now have the option to use the distributed parameters (e.g. building morphological parameters and anthropogenic heat) in urban-climate modeling. For specific details, check out our works.

Latest WRF installers can be downloaded through its official Github repository here.