04/11/2021 15Z: New domain and physics configs. 7.5km Domain now covers entire western US. The nest is now 1.5km and still only covers the Salt Lake City area. Added ptype and another 700mb plot. Reduced runs to 1/day (03Z) because it takes longer, and to allow other things to run during the day.

03/22/2021 15Z: WRF is v4.4.2. Plots were changed to optimized PNGs. While working on the next upgrade, found a bug in Fosberg FWI and corrected it. Still seem to have graupel contamination boosting simulated radar reflectivity, but precipitation amounts still look good.

11/15/2020 15Z: WRF is v4.2.1. I snuck it in a bit ago and forgot to mention it. The 7.5km has been enlarged for reasons, plots have been updated to account. Dust remains gone until I can effiently ingest high resolution soil study data. Physics has also been WSM7 for a bit now.

07/17/2019 03Z: Updated WRF to V4.1.1. Tweaked diffusion. Combined CAPE/CIN plots.

05/02/2019 03Z: New hardware! WRF runs must faster! Expanded the 2.5km domain a bit to include 99.9% of Clark County NV. Plot changes and input data tweaks up next. Hopefully, finer-resolution land erodibility data will help out the blowing dust progs. (I know they are not that good right now...working on it...)

04/26/2019 15Z: WRF upgraded to V4.0.3 for a minute now. Tweaked physics, radiation schemes, and vertical levels again; added blowing dust.

02/08/2019 15Z: Tweaked grids to 7.5/2.5km. Also changed microphysics scheme.

01/11/2019 15Z: WRF is now configured to 6km/2km. This has shown to improve precipitation and wind forecasts in this region. Runtime is really long now, but the better output should be worth it.

08/06/2018: Upgraded to WRF V3.9.1.1. I'll get around to V4.0 when I get around to it, okay? I also fooled around with some of the nitty gritty cumulus stuff, and not overly sure it is working correctly.

05/15/2018: 00Z: Updated plot colorbars. Removed snow, high-, mid-, and low- cloud plots. Added Fire Weather Plots. Tweaked 850-500 moisture plots. Extended 9km runs to 60 hours (96 hour runs coming soon)

10/9/2017: Updated terrain data (solar farms are not water). Removed topo wind correction...for now (there is much work to be done in that area)

04/08/17: Tweaked vertical level distribution again, removed a few less than useful upper-level plots to help speed things along.

02/27/17: Adjusted vertical levels up to 50, as well as the packing near the surface to reduce some errors. Added a full-resolution Las Vegas Valley Zoom option to view 10m winds off the 3km nest.

01/11/17: Do you have an iPad? I whipped up a little webapp based on this site. Navigate here in Safari, then tap the share button and select "Add to Home Screen" and enjoy! The webapp is pretty much in alpha stage right now, but it works! Updated a few cosmetics with plots. A few more plots possibly coming, though free time has been hard to come by lately, so probably not.

11/28/16: Apparently, the power substation that services my WRF box went up in flames on thanksgiving. Power has returned, and runs have resumed.

10/13/16: Refreshed the css for a more fall like look. Added Maximum Wind and Cloud Fraction plots. I was intending to add streamlines to the dewpoint plots, but I have run into difficulties with that, but hopefully soon! Also completely re-wrote WRF-server side code that you will probably never see that makes it a piece of cake for me to update/change things.

10/08/16 00Z: Made some tweaks to the domain configuration and plots. Changed to GFS (0.25 degree) for BC which delays runs by an hour. Retooled domain bounds as well. Naturally, this will probably break everything.

07/06/16 12Z: Now utilizing DFI for "hot" initializations. Expect this to delay runs a tidbit. Also added Updraft Helicity to Domain 2 menu since I was making the plots anyway

06/04/16: Adding back upper-level and integrated plots, as I have improved the reliability of the process!

04/06/16: Hardware upgrades put in place. WRF runs faster now! Planning some domain adjustments as well as html/web tweaks in the next few weeks.

02/18/16: Made some plot tweaks...mainly for better looking wind, accumulated precip, and pwat plots. Upper-level plots are still rolling over and farting, so....

01/27/16: Some upper-level plots are back. I will be adding more as soon as I know they are reliable (fields like vorticity need some....refining).

01/12/16: My dirty ways for producing domain 1 upper air plots have come back to bite. Until I swtich over to using grib2 files for plots (or get some other python things working), any plots requiring vertical/pressure interpolation are gone (upper-level and convective).

01/07/16: Many updates pushed. On the WRF side: inner/3km domain now starts with parent and runs 30 hours. Yonsei PBL scheme is back for now along with mutli-scale K-F cumulus scheme for outer domain. On the web site: pretty much all html, css, and java(script) code replaced with new(er) verions.

12/24/15: Fixing a few bugs. 18/06Z runs should now be 18/6Z (bug in timestring code that made them not run); PBL scheme was changed back to a TKE-based scheme. As soon as I get more time, I will get updates installed that will allow me to go back to using RAP ICs. Also started to address persistent bugs and whatnot with the website in a new design. That will probably take awhile to implement.

11/30/15: Expect missing runs. Working on a new, medium-sized 3km domain (its just easier to get the sort of configs I want without nests). Will likely not just drop this in, but will likely try to update the design of pages. I would not expect the same plots at all either, a lot of upper-air plots might go away. Other items include: continued 4x daily runs, but likely only to 36 hours.

11/20/15: Fixed all of the 3km domain plots...still working on the 9km domain...a limited number of them/times will likely be available.

11/17/15 (00Z): Pulled the trigger on the V3.7.1 update. Things broke as forecast. Should have most things back in a few days, if not, it might be awhile heading into the holidays and whatnot. If its quick, look for more aviation plots, improved meteograms, and more stuff in the 3km plots.

11/7/15: Added a little status indicator to easily know what the status of runs are. Currently also toying with the idea of just one larger 3km domain vs and 9/3 nest when the core is upgraded from V3.4.1. So far so good in all the tests.

10/27/15 (00Z): Changed initialization dataset back to the the RAP (NAM still boundary conditions). Have not gotten around to many of the previously mentioned updates.

10/10/15: Winter updates are coming. Of course, I never removed snow, ice, precip type products over the summer. Some changes will likely include: bigger 9km domain, some winter things in meteograms, probably a wrf version update, and maybe even a parallel run testing some nesting things. It will probably take a few weeks for things to trickle up to the web.

9/19/15 (12Z): Changed the 9km domain cu scheme back to Grell 3d. Will likely be tweaking this to get better representation of convection. (until, that is, I get more power and can reduce dx and not even need parameterization anymore

7/19/15 (12Z): Changed the 9km domain to cu scheme to Kain-Fritsch scheme with moisture-advection trigger. Two reasons behind this; first, it really was not producing convection; this was no bueno. The second is that I do want to test out the moisture advection trigger for some of these tropical infusions; where the typical upper level forcing is rather week, yet (especially on the leading edge of moisture surge) decent convection does develop.

06/28/15: Added a plot that picks out boundaries (especially in the wind field) to the Surface menu for the 3km domain. This plot is a work in progress, so it is bound to change as it gets tested more. Also addressed the issue of nested domains initializing off of parent domain initial/boundary conditions instead of the parent domain itself. This should improve the nest nearer term forecasts since they are getting a "hot" start now.

06/23/15: Updated large portion of the html backend. These updates should make loading of the site more efficient, and will allow easier/more rapid updates on my end. If things look funny, clear cache and refresh

06/20/15: Fixed location of LAS meteograms. It looks like I will keep the static meteograms around for now, so I will be tweaking existing plots and add locations in the next couple of weeks.

06/07/15: Adjusted CAPE, CIN, LI, and Bulk Shear Plots (still work to be done there). Adjusted WRF to help fix occasional crashes (and maybe precip bias). I will attempt to learn enough jquery/ajax to make the wrf pages more efficient...in an effort to reduce workload when menus need to be updated (because I may be increasing to 4 runs/day and may be keeping all 4 runs up until they are replaced 24 hours later [instead of being replaced by very next run]). Also, although they are being produced, I would not even look at meteograms right now. Since I keep tweaking my wrf domain horizontal boundaries...the location is probably not correct. Additionally, since the 3km output frequency was increased to 15 mins, the plots are a little dense. I will probably get around to interactive meteograms eventually.

05/25/15: Made a few changes and updates. The 3km domain will now have 15 min output. I cleaned up the 3km pages as well, and added code so you can use arrow keys to step through images. I also adjusted the WRF to have better packed levels near the surface...which should improve surface wind forecasts. I am still working on a 1km and/or 400m domain for Lake Mead.