There are three ways WRF simulations can be run auto_forecast: Automated hourly forecasts initialiazed with HRRR for 1200-2300 on the current day mostly used for operational wind forecasting on wildland fire incidents on_demand_forecast: Hourly forecasts initialized with HRRR going out as far as you want pastcast: Hourly pastcasts initialized with HRRR Setting up a run All runs are controlled by runWRF.sh This script properly sets the environment (PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, etc.) for running as a cron job See auto_forecast, on_demand_forecast, or pastcast for speicfics related to each type of simulation