It’s been a few years but I don’t remember it being too hard to set up. I did it on slackware, compiling everything from source, so anybody should be able to do it on a distro with dependency resolution.

They provided a zip file that is updated every so often (hourly?) and contains data for your specific region. I just used that. It does have an option that people can use their own data, but I think it’s because most NWS offices run this model in addition to the national models they get from upstream. No normal person has enough input data to be useful.

I haven’t done it in a few years but I used to run my own weather model. If fed the correct data and given time to crunch the numbers, several times a day you can create your own weather forecast that is probably (hopefully) similar to the freely available forecasts from the weather service, TV, radio and apps.

https://www.mmm.ucar.edu/models/wrf

Slackware on desktop, laptop and mini PC, Debian on anything smaller