Xin-Zhong Liang, Professor

The CWRF has been developed on the basis of the Weather Research and Forecasting model by incorporating numerous improvements that are crucial to climate scales, including interactions between land–atmosphere–ocean, convection–microphysics and cloud–aerosol–radiation, and system consistency throughout all process modules. The CWRF improvements have been accomplished through iterative, extensive model refinements, sensitivity experiments, and rigorous evaluations over the past 8 years. As a result, the CWRF has demonstrated greater capability and better performance in simulating the U.S. regional climate than the existing CMM5 and the original WRF. This justifies its initial release for the community use, as scheduled in this summer. The present study provides a general model description and basic skill evaluation. Future CWRF applications will be discussed.