NCSA NEWS

Alliance SC Booth to Feature Interactive Weather Modeling

released November 5, 2001

Contact
Karen Green
NCSA Public Information Officer
kareng@ncsa.uiuc.edu
217.265.0748 phone
217.244.7396 fax

CHAMPAIGN, IL — No one can control the weather, but the National Computational Science Alliance (Alliance) research exhibit at SC2001 will offer the next best thing: an interactive weather modeling demonstration that will allow users to create a virtual storm and examine how it interacts with another storm.

An ongoing demonstration at the Alliance booth (R216) will allow visitors to the SC exhibit hall to choose parameters for a storm simulation, refine those parameters with help from a Data to Knowledge learning model, and then submit them as input into the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model running on high-performance computers at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in Champaign, IL. Processing the simulated data will take one or two hours, demo participants will be encouraged to check on their jobs periodically. Some of the results will be visualized on a high-resolution display wall or plasma display in the Alliance booth.

"We thought that SC2001 would be the perfect setting for demonstrating how interactive weather modeling works and how a diverse collection of technologies can be integrated into the process," said Bob Wilhelmson, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a senior research scientist at NCSA, and leader of the Alliance Environmental Hydrology team. "We will integrate technologies developed both within the Alliance and in the commercial sector into a seamless system designed to help study tornado formation in severe storms."

Wilhelmson is the mastermind behind the demo, which will combine the storm data input by visitors to the Alliance booth with thunderstorm data already in the computer system. The idea, he explained, is to see how two storm systems interact. The user on the SC show floor will enter several parameters for development of a second storm—such as location, temperature, and time. He or she then will examine how this new thunderstorm interacts with the storm already programmed into the computer system.

Such storm interactions may strengthen strong, rotating storms and in some cases, the interaction is likely to lead to stronger low-level mesocyclones in which tornadoes form. In other examples, the interaction may weaken one or both storms.

WRF, the numerical model used to carry out the simulations, is a state-of-the-art computer model developed as a joint effort among numerous universities, research centers, and government laboratories. It can be applied to a wide range of weather simulation problems and can be used on computational grids and a variety of computing platforms. At the Alliance booth, the storm parameters selected by users will be passed into a Data to Knowledge (D2K) learning model developed at NCSA. This model will quickly evaluate the parameters in order to help the user select ones that are likely to result in a good simulation (ones likely to produce a severe storm or tornado). The model will return a score—essentially a measure of storm strength and rotation associated with the given parameters. Once the user decides on a set of parameters, the D2K model will use Sun Microsystems' JavaSpaces software to communicate with middleware called the Grid Science Portal, an Alliance project under development at Indiana University. The Grid Science Portal is a tool that can access grid-based resources, such as high-performance computers at NCSA, and manage a wide range of activities, such as moving data, and launching compute jobs and post processing computations.

Computed data will then be sent back to the Alliance booth, where animations from the simulations will be visualized on the display wall and plasma panel. The display wall will be capable of simultaneously displaying up to 20 precomputed animations from 20 simulations and will allow users to fly through some of the modeled storms in near real time. In addition the simulation data will be fed back into the D2K learning model, and the model will continue to learn from this data and to develop more accurate predictions about the outcome of new simulations.

"The message here is that scientific computing involves a lot of components working together through an infrastructure we call the grid," Wilhelmson said. "It involves integrating various types of models, data analysis, visualization capabilities, middleware tools, storage systems, and other resources. The good news is that we now have the technology to put all these resources right at the fingertips of the scientist. The scientist can then proceed to explore problems of interest."

Indeed, the hundreds of simulations to be performed during SC2001 will enable Wilhelmson's research group to better understand the tornadoes that occurred in Illinois on April 19, 1996 one of the group's science objectives this year.

SC2001, the annual high-performance networking and computing conference, will be held Nov. 10-16 in Denver. The conference exhibit area will be open from Tuesday, Nov. 13, through Thursday, Nov. 15.

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is a leader in developing and deploying cutting-edge high-performance computing, networking, and information technologies. NCSA is a partner in the TeraGrid project, a National Science Foundation initiative to build and deploy the world's largest, fastest, most comprehensive, distributed infrastructure for open scientific research. NCSA also leads the National Computational Science Alliance (Alliance), a partnership to prototype an advanced computational infrastructure for the 21st century that includes more than 50 academic, government, and industry research partners. The NSF Partnerships for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI) program funds the Alliance. In addition to the NSF, NCSA receives support from the state of Illinois, the University of Illinois, private sector partners, and other federal agencies. For more information, see http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/.

 

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