Current Status of ARPS and Future Plan

Current Status

ARPS Version 4.0 was officially released in mid-1995. Since then, many improvements have been made to the ARPS system and as a consequence many sub-releases were made available on this site. The latest release is arps5.2.8 by September 19, 2007.

Plan

Version 5 of ARPS will see further improvements in the numerical solution techniques, complete radiation physics, better cumulus parameterization schemes, an interface to the NMC operational Eta model, enhancements to the four-dimensional data assimilation system, and an adjoint with full-physics.

New capabilities are being continuously developed and incorporated into the ARPS system by the CAPS scientists.

Planned improvements after the Version 5.0 release include 3-D and 4-D variational data assimilation systems that incorporated most of the analysis and retrieval techniques developed in recently years at CAPS, an adjoint with more complete physics, further enhancement and fine tuning of the model physics and support of two-way nesting on MPP platforms.

To ensure maximum portability, we have so far deliberately avoid non-Fortran77 constructs in the ARPS code, except for the most common extensions. Starting from the release of ARPS version 5.0, we will start to adopt and exploit new features and constructs available in Fortran-90 so as to further improve the modularity, flexibility and efficiency of the ARPS system.

ARPS Version 6 will boast further refinements to the physics, numerics, and data assimilation systems.

We will continue our operational real time prediction experiments.