Information about CSU real-time WRF model forecasts for the Big Weather Web project

Our research group is a part of the Big Weather Web project, an NSF-funded effort to develop common and sustainable Big Data infrastructure to support research and education on numerical weather prediction. We are contributing two members to a large ensemble that is being run across numerous universities. Graphics from our two members are available at this site; we expect that graphics from the full ensemble will become available as the project progresses.

• Our two members include the "control" configuration, and one member that uses a different cumulus parameterization.
• Forecasts use WRF-ARW version 3.8.1, and are initialized daily at 0000 UTC and run out to 84 hours.
• The forecasts use 20-km horizontal grid spacing and 43 vertical levels (on a stretched grid with higher resolution near the surface)
• Details of the configuration of each ensemble member are given in the table below:

	Control member	CSU02
Initial/Boundary conditions	0.5 degree GFS, BCs updated every 3 hours	0.5 degree GFS, BCs updated every 3 hours
Cumulus	Kain-Fritsch	Grell-Freitas
Boundary layer	MYJ	MYJ
Microphysics	Thompson	Thompson
Land surface	Noah	Noah
Shortwave radiation	RRTMG	RRTMG
Longwave radiation	RRTMG	RRTMG

(More info on the WRF physics options can be found on the WRF website here.)

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. ACI-1450089. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.