WRF Standard Initialization (SI) is an important and necessary first step in setting up the Weather Forecast Research (WRF) Model. The SI provides three mandatory parts of WRF:

• To define and localize the three dimensional grid,
  
• To specify the 'static' surface characteristics of land, water and vegetation, and
  
• To provide the initial and lateral boundary condition files by interpolating larger scale model data to the domain.
  

These are complicated processes that have been greatly simplified by the development of a graphical user interface (GUI). It provides an efficient method to manipulate the software and modify files. The SI developers highly recommend using the GUI.