WRF
Expedition WRF weather simulations
Expedition WRF is best thought of as a system to add small scale thermal and land effects to the GFS forecast.
It uses the highest resolution GFS data we can obtain and other surface datasets for initialisation and boundary conditions. The 1/36° domains are similar in horizontal and vertical resolution to the HRRR.
It is aimed at sailing locations where high resolution data isn't available (eg Cape Town and NZ) or is is harder to obtain (eg Australia).
Various areas are also available on demand for regattas, such as the Olympics and western Mediterranean sailing venues.
What it isn't
It isn't a replacement for the national mesoscale models such as Access, Arôme, HIRLAM and HRRR.
It also doesn't replace the global models for larger scale areas. WRF and MPAS can be run on a global scale, but realistically we can't take an interpolated subset of data from a global model, interpolate it to a new grid then run it at lower resolution with fewer levels and expect a comparable outcome.
Data
MSLP, rain, 10m wind and gusts, 20m wind, 2m temperature, CAPE & total cloud cover. Others available on request.
The Expedition interface allows only the wind or basic parameters to be downloaded.
Updated every 6 hours (4x daily), except for NZ where the model is updated every 3 hours. Update times can be checked in Expedition before downloading.
Resolution
1/12° 0.083° (< 5nm), 1 hour increments to 72 hours
1/36° 0.028° (< 2nm), 30 minute increments to 36 hours
1/108° 0.009° (1/2nm), 30 minute increments to 24 hours
Minimum of 45 levels. WRF can be run with 35 or fewer levels, but more is always better.