WRF

Overview

Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF) is a state-of-the-art atmospheric modeling system designed for both meteorological research and numerical weather prediction.

Versions 4.0.3, 4.3.1 and 4.3.2 are installed on CSF4.

See also WPS – the WRF Preprocessing System.

Restrictions on use

WRF is open source, and has been released with no restrictions on use (licensing or otherwise).

Set up procedure

We now recommend loading modulefiles within your jobscript so that you have a full record of how the job was run. See the example jobscript below for how to do this.

Load one of the following modulefiles (which will cause the supporting library modules to be loaded too):

module load wrf/4.3.3-foss-2020a-dmpar       # Note that WPS 4.3.3 is NOT available yet
module load wrf/4.3.2-foss-2020a-dmpar       # Note that WPS 4.3.2 is NOT available yet
module load wrf/4.3.1-foss-2020a-dmpar
module load wrf/4.0.3-foss-2020a-dmpar

Please see the WPS instructions for the corresponding WPS modulefiles.

Copy the running directory (which contains standard input files required by WRF) for your version of the model using:

# Work in your scratch area. For example:
cd ~/scratch

# Copy the running directory from the central install to your current directory
cp -a $WRF_RUNDIR scenario_name

This will create a directory named scenario_name in the current directory.

Running the application

Please do not run WRF on the login node – it is computationally intensive, and requires MPI parallisation to run properly. Jobs should be submitted to the compute nodes via batch.

Single node multicore parallel batch job submission

Create a jobscript similar to the following:

#!/bin/bash --login
#SBATCH -p multicore         # (or --partition=) Single node parallel job
#SBATCH -n 40                # (or --ntasks=) Number of cores - can be 2--40

# Load the version you require (remove any inherited modules first)
module purge
module load wrf/4.3.2-foss-2020a-dmpar

# Remove any old log files (optional)
rm -f rsl.error.* rsl.out.*

mpirun wrf.exe
        #
        # Use your required executable (e.g., wrf.exe or real.exe)

The rm -f command is needed to clear out any pre-existing log files (which is not done by the program itself).

Multi-node parallel batch job submission

Create a jobscript similar to the following:

#!/bin/bash --login
#SBATCH -p multinode         # (or --partition=) Multinode parallel job
#SBATCH -n 80                # (or --ntasks=) Number of cores - can be 80 or more in multiples of 40

# Load the version you require (remove any inherited modules first)
module purge
module load wrf/4.3.2-foss-2020a-dmpar

# Remove any old log files (optional)
rm -f rsl.error.* rsl.out.*

mpirun wrf.exe
        #
        # Use your required executable (e.g., wrf.exe or real.exe)

The rm -f command is needed to clear out any pre-existing log files (which is not done by the program itself).

Further info

• WRF website

Updates

None.