Software Release: Announcing UPP V4.1 Release

The Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) is pleased to announce the release of the Unified Post Processor Version 4.1.  While many of the functionalities and supported features remain the same as previous versions, there are significant modifications that support a larger goal to further align the community distributed code with National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) operations. The changes to the UPP in the current release reflect this effort and can be viewed as a transitional phase as work continues toward this goal.  Please review the updates carefully.  

There are important changes to the directory structure, build procedures and software dependencies.  The motivation for these changes is to further align the community software with operational software, including alignment of the repository structures, to help facilitate code management procedures. 

Directory Structure and Build Dependency Changes include:

  • Removal of several supporting NCEP libraries from the UPP package and making them a pre-install library dependency
  • Removal of copygb code to its own individual repository to be installed and used as a separate utility (https://github.com/NCAR/copygb)
  • Reorganization of the directory tree to align with EMC code
  • New dependencies required to be pre-installed prior to building UPP code
    • NCAR/NCEPlibs (https://github.com/NCAR/NCEPlibs)
      • Note that this repository is separate from the authoritative NOAA NCEPLibs repositories; it is maintained by DTC staff and may have minor code changes from that of NOAA maintained libraries.  This is necessary to ensure continued support for current features. Work is underway to transition to the authoritative NOAA repository in effort to remove this redundancy.

Please carefully read the new procedures on the UPP Users webpage or in the V4.1 Users’ Guide for building the software. 

In addition to these code infrastructure changes, there are a number of functional improvements to the UPP as well. 

Major Improvements and New Features include:

  • GOES 16 products
  • Fields related to HRRR-smoke (e.g. smoke tracers, visibility, etc.)
  • FV3GFS model data in netcdf format
  • Code access via GitHub repository 

Additional release notes:

  • Serial builds are no longer supported.
  • This will be the last supported version for WRF model data.
  • This will be the last supported version of GRIB1 output format.

Download Information:
The preferred method for obtaining the code is to clone the release from GitHub.  Please visit the download page for links and more release information: https://dtcenter.org/community-code/unified-post-processor-upp/download.

Users can sign up for updates regarding the UPP software package at: https://dtcenter.org/community-code/unified-post-processor-upp/subscribe

We would like to thank contributors from NCEP, the DTC, and from the user community who have contributed to this release. This release is the result of the joint efforts of NOAA/NCEP and DTC through the support of NOAA and the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Please send questions or comments related to the UPP software package to: upp-help@ucar.edu.
Stay tuned for future announcements regarding the UPP software.  

~ The UPP Team ~