WRF4G: WRF experiment management made simple

Abstract

This work presents a framework, WRF4G, to manage the experiment workflow of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) modelling system. WRF4G provides a flexible design, execution and monitoring for a general class of scientific experiments. It has been designed with the aim of facilitating the management and reproducibility of complex experiments. Furthermore, the concepts behind the design of this framework can be straightforwardly extended to other models. We describe the user interface and the new concepts required to design parameter-sweep, hindcast and climate simulation experiments. A number of examples are provided, based on the design used for existing (published) WRF experiments. This software is open-source and publicly available http://www.meteo.unican.es/software/wrf4g).