The CWRF has been developed on the basis of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF)
model by incorporating numerous improvements that are crucial to climate scales, including
interactions between land–atmosphere–ocean, convection–microphysics and cloud–aerosol–radiation,
and system consistency throughout all process modules. The CWRF improvements have been accomplished
through iterative, extensive model refinements, sensitivity experiments, and rigorous evaluations
over the past 8 years under close collaborations with the NOAA Air Resource Laboratory (ARL) and
the NOAA Center for Atmospheric Sciences (NCAS). As a result, the CWRF has demonstrated greater
capability and better performance in simulating the U.S. regional climate than the existing CMM5
(Climate extension of the MM5) and the WRF. This presentation will provide a general model description
and basic skill evaluation over the U.S. The emphasis will be on elaboration of the advanced physics
parameterizations that are developed for CWRF but can be readily transferred to the NCEP operational
regional or global models to improve weather forecasts or climate predictions. Other CWRF capabilities
and applications for climate change impacts will also be discussed.