Unified Workflow Tools - Earth Prediction Innovation Center
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Unified Workflow Tools

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Welcome

The Unified Forecast System (UFS) is a community-based, coupled, comprehensive Earth modeling system. NOAA’s operational model suite for numerical weather prediction (NWP) is quickly transitioning to the UFS from a number of different modeling systems. The UFS enables research, development, and contribution opportunities within the broader Weather Enterprise (including government, industry, and academia). For more information about the UFS, visit the UFS Portal.

Description

The UFS Unified Workflow (UW) project is a collaboration between EPIC and several community partners, including NOAA Global Systems Laboratory (GSL) and the University of Colorado Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CU/CIRES), who share a common goal of building software that will unify UFS workflows. The team’s uwtools software is a modern, open-source Python package that helps automate common tasks needed for many standard NWP workflows. It also provides drivers to automate the configuration and execution of UFS components, providing flexibility, interoperability, and usability to various UFS Applications. The Unified Workflow (UW) tools are accessible from both a command-line interface (CLI) and a Python API. The CLI automates many core NWP workflow functions; the API supports all CLI operations and additionally provides access to in-memory objects to facilitate more novel use cases. These options allow users to integrate the package into pre-existing bash and Python scripts, in addition to providing some handy tools for use in day-to-day work with NWP systems.

Getting Started

The recommended UW tools installation mechanism uses the Python package and virtual-environment manager conda. The Miniforge variant of Miniconda, which by default uses packages from the conda-forge project, is an especially useful basis for working with conda. The UW Tools Installation Guide provides detailed installation instructions both for users who are starting from scratch and for users with an existing conda installation on their system. Developers can refer to the Developer Setup chapter for instructions on creating and building a bash development shell for their uwtools development work. 

Documentation & User Support

The UW Tools User Guide has the most comprehensive information on UW Tools, including its Command Line Interface (CLI) and Python API. Users may need different versions of the User Guide depending on their goals:

Version

Description

Documentation for the head of the main branch, which contains new development work

Documentation for the most recent release 

Developer Support

Releases

  • The Unified Workflow frequently issues releases. See the Releases page on GitHub for information on current and past releases.

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