The UFS-R2O physics and dynamics development team aims to improve the models deterministic physics parameterizations, stochastic physics, and dynamical core, in order to improve physical process descriptions, including their uncertainty representation, and mitigate systematic model biases across all of the UFS operational applications. The focus of the team is on atmospheric physics (clouds, convection, boundary layer, radiation and gravity wave drag) as well as land surface processes and ocean perturbations. 

Since both research and operational forecast centers are moving towards unified earth system modeling frameworks for applications across different spatial and temporal scales, unification of physics parameterizations have become a high priority for the UFSR2O physics/dynamics development team. The team is currently working across all of the UFSR2O applications including global, regional and hurricane forecast applications with time-scales ranging from a few hours out to seasonal prediction. The goal is to unify the parameterizations to the extent possible between the various applications. This means that parameterizations traditionally developed specifically for weather and climate models, and for regional and global models, require further development and evaluation to be scale adaptive for various earth system model applications.

The UFSR2O physics and dynamics development team are also developing stochastic physics parameterizations to address model uncertainty due to sub-grid scale variability and approximations made in physics parameterizations in close collaboration with the physics developers to ensure physically based perturbations.

Lastly, the development team investigates how the model physics responds to changes in diffusion and numerical methods of the model dynamical core. A particular focus is to seek improvements in storm structures in the model applications running at high resolution.