Weather Research and Forecasting Model

The effort to develop WRF began in the latter part of the 1990s and was a collaborative partnership principally among the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (represented by the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) and the (then) Forecast Systems Laboratory (FSL)), the Air Force Weather Agency (AFWA), the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), the University of Oklahoma (OU), and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

WRF allows researchers to produce simulations reflecting either real data (observations, analyses) or idealized atmospheric conditions.

WRF provides operational forecasting a flexible and robust platform, while offering advances in physics, numerics, and data assimilation contributed by the many research community developers.

The Advanced Research WRF (ARW) is supported to the community by the NCAR Mesoscale and Microscale Meteorology Laboratory.

The WRF also serves as the basis for the North American Mesoscale (NAM) model at 12km and 3km grid resolutions.