Cyberinfrastructure to support Real-time,
End-to-End Regional Forecasting
by
Tom Baltzer, Doug
Lindholm, Mohan Ramamurthy and Ben Dominico
Abstract:
For nearly a decade, the academic community has been running
regionalized mesoscale models in near-realtime to
support local needs in education, research, and outreach. The use of mesoscale modeling systems (e.g.,
MM5, WRF, RAMS, ARPS and Workstation Eta) in
quasi-operational settings is continuing to grow and has resulted in over 30
such efforts at just U. S.
universities. The success of real-time
modeling programs like those at the University
of Oklahoma/CAPS and University
of Washington is well known, but
many new efforts (e.g., University of
Northern Iowa’s STORM Project) in
the Unidata community are continually emerging
Over the years, Unidata has developed several tools that
have either directly or indirectly facilitated these modeling activities. For example, the community is using Unidata
technologies such as the Internet Data Distribution (IDD) system, Local Data
Manger (LDM), decoders, netCDF libraries,
Thematic Realtime Environmental Distributed Data
Services (THREDDS), GEMPAK, and the Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) in their
real-time prediction efforts. In
essence, these technologies for data reception and processing, local and remote
access, cataloging, and analysis and visualization coupled with technologies
from others in the community are becoming the foundation of a
cyberinfrastructure to support an end-to-end regional forecasting system. To build on these capabilities, the Unidata Program
Center is pleased to be a
significant contributor to the Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery
(LEAD) project, a NSF-funded multi-institutional large Information Technology
Research effort. The goal of LEAD is to create an integrated and scalable
framework for identifying, accessing, preparing, assimilating, predicting,
managing, analyzing, mining, and visualizing a broad array of meteorological
data and model output, independent of format and physical location. To that
end, LEAD will create a series of interconnected, heterogeneous Grid
environments to provide a complete framework for mesoscale
research, including a set of integrated Grid and Web Services.
This talk will focus on the transition from today’s
end-to-end systems into the types of systems that the LEAD project envisions.
