Unified Post-Processing (UPP)

The UPP code is publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/NOAA-EMC/UPP.

Documentation for Previous Versions of UPP

Background Information

The Unified Post Processor (UPP) software package is a software package designed to generate useful products from raw model output. The UPP is currently used in operations with the Global Forecast System (GFS), GFS Ensemble Forecast System (GEFS), North American Mesoscale (NAM), Rapid Refresh (RAP), High Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR), Short Range Ensemble Forecast (SREF), Hurricane WRF (HWRF) applications, and is also used in Unified Forecasting System (UFS) applications. The UPP provides the capability to compute a variety of diagnostic fields and interpolate to pressure levels or other vertical coordinates. UPP also incorporates the Joint Center for Satellite Data Assimilation (JCSDA) Community Radiative Transfer Model (CRTM) to compute model derived brightness temperature (TB) for various instruments and channels. This additional feature enables the generation of a number of simulated satellite products including GOES products. Output from the UPP is in National Weather Service (NWS) and World Meteorological Organization (WMO) GRIB2 format and can be used directly by visualization, plotting, or verification packages, or for further downstream post-processing, e.g. statistical post-processing techniques. Examples of UPP products include:

T, Z, humidity, wind, cloud water, cloud ice, rain, and snow on pressure levels
SLP, shelter level T, humidity, and wind fields
Precipitation-related fields
PBL-related fields
Severe weather products (e.g. CAPE, Vorticity, Wind shear)
Radiative/Surface fluxes
Cloud related fields
Aviation products
Radar reflectivity products
Satellite look-alike products

Prerequisites

The UPP requires certain NCEPLIBS packages to be installed via the spack-stack project. For instructions on installing these packages as a bundle via spack-stack, see: https://spack-stack.readthedocs.io/en/latest/. The UPP/modulefiles directory indicates which package versions are used and supported on Level 1 systems.

Community Support

Community support for the Unified Forecast System (UFS) UPP in FV3-based applications is provided by the Earth Prediction Innovation Center (EPIC). Community support for the UPP with WRF is no longer available.

Support for the UFS UPP is provided through GitHub Discussions.
The UPP User's Guide for the latest standalone public release is UPP v11.0.0.
The UPP User's Guide for develop branch is UPP develop.
The UPP wiki includes relevant information and links for users and developers.
Instructions on technical code documentation are available in a set of Doxygen Documentation Slides.

Code Managers: Wen Meng (EMC), Huiya Chuang (EMC), Fernando Andrade-Maldonado (EPIC)