WRF Hindcast

The WRF Hindcast Project generates the data used in the Grow Degree Calculator and the Soil Moisture Estimator projects. WRF stands for Weather, Research, and Forecasting and is a program made available by UCAR/NCAR and many other research participants.

WRF is normally used to forecast weather into the future, but for our purposes we use it to simulate weather in the past for better accuracy; in effect simulating a weather station every 3.3 kilometers.

Sectors

WRF current active sectors in green.

The area modeled by the WRF program is called a "domain", but since this implementation uses three domains (at 30km, 10km, and 3.3km resolution), the area of interest, the third domain, is called a "sector". Each sector is made up of 171x171 "pixels", with each pixel 3.3km x 3.3km in size. Each pixel's data is accessible by client programs indicating latitude and longitude coordinates.

The image to the right shows sectors defined, and those currently active are shown in green.

Procedure

procedure

WRF Output

variables