The Planetary Weather Research
and Forecasting Model
The PlanetWRF public release is now official! Click the “get planetWRF” tab on the lower left panel.
The Planetary Weather Research and Forecasting model (planetWRF) is a general purpose numerical model for planetary atmospheres research. It has been developed jointly at Cornell University, Ashima Research, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Caltech, and Kobe University. The core of the model is based on the terrestrial Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model developed at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).
The first PlanetWRF paper was published late in 2007, and is available here.
WRF is a highly modular code written to take advantage of modern, high-speed, massively parallel computers, such as the CITerra system, but flexible enough to also run on a Mac laptop computer. WRF is used for a variety of applications in research on terrestrial micro- and meso-scale meteorology and in weather forecasting via data assimilation.
Several major modifications of WRF were needed to allow it to run as a global and as a planetary model – work completed since 2004, primarily by Anthony Toigo, Claire Newman, and Mark Richardson. All of the global modifications have now been infused back into the terrestrial version of the model (WRFv3.1 and higher) by NCAR.
PlanetWRF has so far been applied to Mars, Titan, and Venus. For Mars, the model has been used to simulate convective structures in the boundary layer on scales down to a few tens of meters, and global scale circulation systems in General Circulation Model (GCM) mode. For Titan, the formation of methane clouds and rain is being studied, as well as the global circulation. Finally for Venus, the mechanisms that maintain the superrotation of the atmosphere are being examined.
For a slideshow ‘tour’ of planetWRF, click here.
The model development has primarily been supported by the NASA Applied Information Systems Research (AISR) program, with additional funding from the NASA Mars Fundamental Research and Outer Planets Research Programs.