WRF-CMake

• Project overview
  • Currently supported platforms
  • Currently unsupported features
• Installation
  • Manually from source
  • Using Homebrew or Linuxbrew
  • Binary distribution (Experimental)
• Documentation
• Example usage
• How to cite
• How to contribute
• Testing framework
• Changes to be upstreamed
• Copyright and license

Project overview

WRF-CMake adds CMake support to the latest version of the Advanced Research Weather Research and Forecasting model (here WRF, for short) with the intention of streamlining and simplifying its configuration and build process. In our view, the use of CMake provides model developers, code maintainers, and end-users with several advantages such as robust incremental rebuilds, flexible library dependency discovery, native tool-chains for Windows, macOS, and Linux with minimal external dependencies, thus increasing portability, and automatic generation of project files for different platforms.

WRF-CMake is designed to work alongside the current releases of WRF, therefore you can still compile your code using the legacy Makefiles included in WRF and WPS for any of the currently unsupported features.

For more details, please see the short summary paper WRF-CMake: integrating CMake support into the Advanced Research WRF (ARW) modelling system on the Journal of Open Source Software website.

Currently supported platforms

• Configurations for special environments like supercomputers
• Linux with gcc/gfortran, Intel, and Cray compilers
• macOS with gcc/gfortran and Intel compilers
• Windows with MinGW-w64 and gcc/gfortran

Currently unsupported features

• WRF-DA
• WRFPLUS
• WRF-Chem
• WRF-Hydro
• File and line number in wrf_error_fatal() messages
• WRF-NMM (discontinued -- see https://dtcenter.org/wrf-nmm/users/)
• Automatic moving nests (via TERRAIN_AND_LANDUSE environment variable)
• CTSM land surface model

Installation

The installation of WRF-CMake or WPS-CMake is straightforward thanks to the downloadable pre-built binaries for most Linux distributions (specifically RPM-based and Debian-based distribution-compatible), macOS, and Windows (see binary distribution below) -- most users wishing to run WRF on their system can simply download the pre-compiled binaries without the need to build from source. Alternately, you can install WRF-CMake or WPS-CMake using the Homebrew/Linuxbrew package manager, or by building and installing the software from source -- please refer to the build and install manually from source and using Homebrew or Linuxbrew section below.

Please note that HPC users, or users seeking to run WRF in the 'most optimal' configuration for their system are advised to build WRF-CMake manually from source or to use the Homebrew/Linuxbrew package manager.

Manually from source

To build and install WRF-CMake or WPS-CMake manually from source, see the install from source page.

Using Homebrew or Linuxbrew

WRF-CMake and WPS-CMake can be built and installed using Homebrew (macOS) or Linuxbrew (Linux) with the following commands:

brew tap wrf-cmake/wrf
brew install wrf -v

Binary distribution (Experimental)

To download the latest pre-compiled binary releases, see below -- please note that these distributions are currently experimental, therefore please report any issues here.

• WRF-CMake (serial and dmpar): https://github.com/WRF-CMake/wrf/releases.
• WPS-CMake (serial and dmpar): https://github.com/WRF-CMake/wps/releases.

Note on MPI

If you want to launch WRF-CMake and WPS-CMake binary distributions built in dmpar to run on multiple processes, you need to have MPI installed on your system.

• On Windows, download and install Microsoft MPI (msmpisetup.exe) from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=56727.
• On macOS you can get it through Homebrew using brew install open-mpi. Note: Binary distributions < 4.1 use mpich, in which case you need to brew install mpich and possibly uninstall open-mpi first.
• On Linux, use your package manager to download mpich (version ≥ 3.0.4). E.g. sudo apt install mpich on Debian-based systems or sudo yum install mpich on RPM-based system like CentOS.

Documentation

• For the WRF model technical documentation, please refer to A Description of the Advanced Research WRF Version 4.
• For the WRF model user documentation, please refer to The Advanced Research WRF version 4 Modeling System User’s Guide.

Example usage

If you have already used WRF/WPS before and you just want a quick tutorial to go over the main steps, we have put together a very basic tutorial on our sister-project's website GIS4WRF with step-by-step instructions: Simulate The 2018 European Heat Wave with WRF-CMake.

Otherwise, if you are a beginner, we recommend going through the basics or running the case studies as described in the WRF-ARW Online Tutorial.

How to cite

When using WRF-CMake, please cite both model, and software (with version), e.g.:

We used the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model (Skamarock et al., 2018), WRF-CMake (Riechert and Meyer, 2019a) version 4.1.0 (Riechert and Meyer, 2019b) to ...

The corresponding reference list should be as follows

Riechert, M., & Meyer, D. (2019a). WRF-CMake: Integrating CMake support into the Advanced Research WRF (ARW) modelling system. Journal of Open Source Software, 4(41), 1468. https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.01468

Riechert, M., & Meyer, D. (2019b). WRF-CMake: integrating CMake support into the Advanced Research WRF (ARW) modelling system (Version WRF-CMake-4.1.0). Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3403343

Skamarock, W. C., Klemp, J. B., Dudhia, J., Gill, D. O., Liu, Z., Berner, J., … Huang, X.-Y. (2019). A Description of the Advanced Research WRF Model Version 4. NCAR Technical Note NCAR/TN-556+STR, 145. https://doi.org/10.5065/1dfh-6p97

If you are looking to cite a different version of WRF-CMake, please see the list of WRF-CMake DOIs on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3403342.

How to contribute

If you are looking to contribute, please read our Contributors' guide for details.

Testing framework

In our current GitHub set-up, we perform a series of compilation and regression tests at each commit using the WRF-CMake Automated Testing Suite (WATS) on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

When you build WRF or WRF-CMake yourself then you have already done a compilation test. If you like to replicate the regression tests, then follow the steps on the WATS page.

Changes to be upstreamed

The following is a list of changes to be upsteamed:

• dyn_em/module_big_step_utilities_em.F: Fix non-standard line continuation character (\ instead of &) leading to compile errors on Cray compilers
• external/io_grib1/MEL_grib1/{grib_enc.c,gribputgds.c,pack_spatial.c}: Remove redundant header includes causing symbol conflicts in Windows
• external/io_grib2/g2lib/{dec,enc}_png.c: Changed type 'voidp' to 'png_voidp' to make it compatible with newer libpng versions. See: https://trac.macports.org/ticket/36470
• external/io_grib2/g2lib/enc_jpeg2000.c: Removed redundant image.inmem_=1; to make it compatible with newer libjasper versions >= 1.900.25
• external/io_grib_share/open_file.c, external/io_grib2/bacio-1.3/bacio.v1.3.c, external/io_int/io_int_idx.c, external/RSL_LITE/c_code.c: Fixed file opening on Windows which is text-mode by default and has been changed to binary mode
• external/io_netcdf/wrf_io.F90: Added alternative XDEX(A,B,C) macro for systems without M4
• external/RSL_LITE/c_code.c: Fixed condition of preprocessing definition for minf to be Windows compatible
• phys/module_sf_clm.F: Fixed missing IFPORT module import needed for non-standard subroutine abort when using Intel Fortran
• share/landread.c: Fixed header includes for Windows (io.h instead of unistd.h)
• tools/gen_{interp,irr_diag}.c: Fixed missing function aliasing for Windows for strcasecmp, rindex, index
• tools/gen_irr_diag.c: Remove redundant sys/resource.h header include which would be unavailable on Windows
• tools/registry.c: Fixed incorrect Windows-conditional header include for string.h (needed in all cases, not just non-Windows)
• var/run/crtm_coeffs: Removed broken absolute UNIX symlink as this causes trouble with git operations in Windows

Copyright and license

General WRF copyright and license applies for any files part of the original WRF distribution -- see the README file for more details.

Additional files provided by WRF-CMake are licensed according to LICENSE_CMAKE.txt if the relevant file contains the following header at the beginning of the file, otherwise the general WRF copyright and license applies.

WRF-CMake (https://github.com/WRF-CMake/wrf).
Copyright <year> M. Riechert and D. Meyer. Licensed under the MIT License.