Encyclopedia

The Rapid Refresh Forecast System (RRFS) is a computer weather forecasting model developed by the U.S. National Weather Service (NWS) to produce short-term, highly detailed forecasts across North America. It is built to update itself every hour with fresh weather observations and to simulate individual thunderstorms directly, making it especially useful for predicting fast-changing weather…

REFS stands for RRFS Ensemble Forecast System. It is not a stand-alone weather model in the way GFS (Global Forecast System), HRRR (High-Resolution Rapid Refresh), or RRFS (Rapid Refresh Forecast System) are. Instead, REFS is the built-in ensemble component of RRFS itself, a way of running RRFS many times with small variations and combining the…