July 21, 2010 - NCAR Day Two

After a struggle to get up to campus on my bike (not a story for now), I'm reading through the WRF manual to get a better idea for the flow of WPS --> WRF. I have a few things that I'll need to learn:

1. What are nested domains, and why are they useful?
2. Where do I get the GRIB meteorological data for ungrib.exe? Will I be able to use CCSM climate data? And if so, how will I get it into the right format?
3. I need to get familiar with the namelist variables, and the particulars of their differences. Should I just run several of the examples to get familiar?

So far (I need to keep track of these things), I've downloaded, gunzipped, detarred, and configured and compiled WRF and WPS. They are in /blhome/bsteiner/WRFdir. I have configured WRF/Chem, and it is compiling now. It was placed in the ~/WRFdir/WRFV3/ directory.

Alright, now I'm compiling WRF/Chem...which is taking 2 - 3 hours, which Alma (downstairs) has informed me is normal. I'm also taking off to see a presentation by Wallace Broecker, the man who coined the phrase "global warming." It was interesting.