Increased activity expected at NSF NCAR Mesa Lab during Super Science Saturday on Nov. 1, 2025.
View more information.The Weather Research and Forecasting model is a mesoscale numerical weather prediction system designed for both atmospheric research and operational forecasting applications.
It features two dynamical cores, a data assimilation system, and software architecture supporting parallel computation and system extensibility. The model serves a wide range of meteorological applications across scales from tens of meters to thousands of kilometers.
Learn more about the Weather Research and Forecasting model, get user support, see the most up-to-date releases, and more.
WRF-Chem integrates chemistry and meteorology with interactions at every time step. It contains a spectrum of options to handle gas-phase chemistry and aerosols. In a simple configuration, WRF-Chem can be used for dispersion forecasts for volcanic ash, dust, and smoke, while more complex applications include the prediction of air quality and investigation of sophisticated interactions such as aerosol indirect effects and aqueous phase chemistry. More details.
WRF-Hydro provides an extensible multi-scale and multi-physics land-atmosphere modeling capability for conservative, coupled, and uncoupled assimilation and prediction of major water cycle components such as precipitation, soil moisture, snow pack, ground water, streamflow, and inundation. More details.
WRF-Fire is based on NSF NCAR’s Coupled Atmosphere-Wildland Fire Environment (CAWFE) model. It utilizes nesting to predict wildland fire spread through a high-resolution, large-eddy simulation approach. WRF-Fire development is addressing crown fire spread and the assimilation of fire parameter measurements using imagery from aircraft as well as satellite data from NASA's Visible and Infrared Imagery Radiometer Suite. More details.
WRF-LES is an advanced turbulence-resolving capability based on a large-eddy simulation (LES) approach to address high-resolution simulations of flows in idealized, canonical atmospheric boundary layers and turbulence-resolving simulations of realistic, evolving boundary layers driven by large-scale flows. Recent developments include a parameterization for wind turbines, a scale-aware planetary boundary layer (PBL) scheme for scales between 100 meters and 1 kilometer, a turbulence-triggering LES approach, and a surface layer parameterization accounting for surface heterogeneity. More details.
WRF-Solar is for solar energy forecasting and applications, and has been created in an NSF NCAR collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy. Recent developments include improved solar tracking accounting, parameterizations for irradiances between expensive radiation scheme calls, fast radiative transfer code to calculate surface irradiances, and parameterization to improve the representation aerosol direct effect. More details.
WRF-Urban couples an integrated, cross-scale urban modeling system to WRF to fill an urgent need to understand the impacts of urbanization on regional weather, climate, air quality, public health, and water resources. The system integrates multiple urban-modeling capabilities (e.g., building/structure impact parameterizations) and localized datasets. More details.
