Announcement: UFS Land Data Assimilation (DA) System v1.2.0 Released on 12/11/2023

[gspetro-NOAA]

The Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC) and the Unified Forecast System (UFS) community are proud to announce the public release of the Land Data Assimilation (DA) System version 1.2.0. This release is an update to the version 1.1.0 release from May 2023 and reflects a number of changes currently available in the land-DA_workflow development branch. In the Land DA System, the Noah-MP land surface model (LSM) in the UFS Weather Model (WM) and the Joint Effort for Data assimilation Integration (JEDI) system are used to assimilate snow depth data via the Local Ensemble Transform Kalman Filter-Optimal Interpolation (LETKF-OI) algorithm. The new release includes the following updates:

• Integration of the UFS Noah-MP land component into the Land DA System for use as an alternative to the Common Community Physics Package (CCPP) Noah-MP LSM land driver. The coupling layer of the land component is developed using the Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF) and the National Unified Operational Prediction Capability (NUOPC) interoperability layer.
• Updates to model forcing options for use of the UFS land component
  • Provided a new analysis option in the cubed-sphere native grid using GSWP3 forcing
  • Established global land grid-point consistency with the head of the UFS WM baseline test cases
  • Added a new sample configuration file (settings_DA_cycle_gswp3)
  • Included an additional ECMWF ERA5 reanalysis forcing option in the existing vector-to-tile conversion analysis process
• CTest suite upgrades—the ERA5 CTests now test the operability of seven major components of Land DA: vector2tile, create_ens, letkfoi_snowda, apply_jediincr, tile2vector, land_driver, and ufs_datm_land.
• Upgrade of the JEDI DA system to JEDI Skylab v4.0
• Updates to sample datasets for the release (see the Land DA data bucket)
• Singularity container (ubuntu20.04-intel-landda-release-public-v1.2.0.img) updates to support the changes described above
• Documentation updates to reflect the changes for this release

The v1.2.0 User's Guide has been updated to reflect these improvements to the Land DA System, and test cases with all associated data files are also available to the public in the Land DA data bucket). Interested users can get support by submitting a question through the GitHub Discussions Q & A page.

For more information about this release, including contributors, see the full article on the EPIC website!