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GIS4WRF/gis4wrf
QGIS toolkit 🧰 for pre- and post-processing 🔨, visualizing 🔍, and running simulations 💻 in the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model 🌀
GIS4WRF is a QGIS plugin that wraps the WRF atmospheric model workflow — domain configuration, data downloads, simulation execution, and NetCDF/GRIB visualization — into a GUI. It targets atmospheric scientists and researchers who need to run mesoscale weather simulations without wrangling WRF's notoriously painful namelist setup by hand.
The namelist schema approach (YAML-defined in nml_schemas/wps.yml and wrf.yml) is smart — it means the schema can be updated without touching the UI code. Shipping pre-built MPI-enabled WRF binaries via WRF-CMake removes what is normally a multi-day build pain for new users. The core/plugin separation is clean; the core layer has no QGIS dependency, which makes it testable independently. It has a published peer-reviewed paper (EnvSoft 2019), which matters for academic adoption and citation credit.
Last commit was February 2023 — WRF has had several releases since then and the plugin appears unmaintained, which is a real risk if you depend on it for research. The test coverage is shallow (five test files covering bbox, CRS, namelist, and binary format — nothing touching the downloaders or simulation runner). Documentation lives on an external GitHub Pages site rather than in-repo, so if that goes stale you lose onboarding entirely. No support for WRF-Python or xarray in the post-processing layer, meaning any analysis beyond basic visualization still requires dropping out to the command line.