We have described an initial prototype for implementing urgent workflows for predicting the impacts of hurricanes, which include a new priority-aware scheduler, SPRUCE, for token-based authorization and carefully thought out policies on local resources. Despite the promise of this early work, there are many issues to research and resolve in the domain of urgent computing:

• Procedures for describing, negotiating and guaranteeing different levels of quality of service for urgent computing (e.g., run immediately, run within six hours, next to run, etc).
• Economic models for sites, potentially around the world, to be compensated for providing their resources in an on-demand mode to those using urgent computing. Such an economic model for urgently available resources would then require scientists and authorities to in turn take into account economic cost when designing model suites and balance this against the potential risk.
• Policies and approaches for competing urgent scenarios, at the simplest level dealing with multiple concurrent hurricanes, but also handling for example modeling a Category 5 hurricane in Louisiana at the same time as a forest fire approaching Los Angeles in California.
• The configurations for model ensembles used today are still relatively static, and instead should be dynamically constructed to adapt to both the resource cost and availability and the physical situation (for example, a larger suite of models may be appropriate for a Category 5 hurricane than a Category 1 hurricane, or for a situation where a large number of ensembles are needed to provide appropriate confidence in results).