UFS-AQM Community Version Capability Announcement

[jdkublnick]

UFS-AQM Community Version Capability Announcement

The NOAA Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC), in collaboration with the Unified Forecast System (UFS) community, is pleased to announce a new capability in the UFS Short-Range Weather (SRW) App: the inclusion of the UFS-Air Quality Model (UFS-AQM) community version. The UFS-AQM community version is now available in the UFS-SRW “develop” branch.

This community version includes most of the features planned for the next operational implementation (UFS-AQM v8), including upgrades to the Community Multiscale Air Quality Model (CMAQ) v5.4, updates to Common Community Physics Package (CCPP) parameterizations, enhanced emissions datasets, improved fire plume-rise treatment, and additional evaluation capabilities. This release is supported on Tier-1 platforms, including Ursa, Gaea-C6, Orion/Hercules, and Derecho.

The UFS-AQM community version also includes the following three features not planned for the operational implementation:

• A Model Evaluation using Observations, Diagnostics and Experiments – Model Observation Evaluation Toolkit (MELODIES MONET) based evaluation utility that optionally runs following a UFS-AQM forecast or “offline” based on pre-computed UFS-AQM experiments. The framework produces statistics and graphical outputs, allowing modelers to assess forecast performance across multiple observational datasets. The evaluation framework code is currently hosted in EPIC’s AQM-Eval repository.

• Pre-configured scientific use cases for Atmospheric Emissions and Reactions Observed from Megacities to Marine Areas (AEROMMA) and Fall Ozone with support for automated data staging and configuration from the NOAA-EPIC S3 bucket.

• An optional post-task that compares model outputs against a pre-established evaluation baseline.

The AQM section of the UFS-SRW User’s Guide has been updated to reflect these enhancements and to help users configure and run AQM experiments. Interested users can get additional support by submitting questions through the UFS-SRW App GitHub Discussions Q&A page.

For more information about this Capability Announcement (CA), including contributors, see the EPIC website!