It seems only fitting as hurricane season is well underway that some news about weather forecasting get the spotlight. The Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, in a multiple partnership led by NOAA, successfully demonstrated never before achieved storm forecasting by producing higher resolution results than currently used forecasting models are capable of. Over a three month period from April to June, PSC utilized a new forecasting model on its Terascale Computing System to generate three forecasts a day over an area of the Great Plains in the midwest. According to Kelvin Droegemeier, director of the Center for Analysis and Prediction of Storms at the University of Oklahoma and one of the partners of the effort,

Results from the spring experiment suggest that the atmosphere may be fundamentally more predictable at the scale of individual storms and especially organized storm systems than previously thought. Real time daily forecasts over such a large area and with such high spatial resolution have never been attempted before.

It’s good to see a parallel software success story as is the case with this new weather modeling system called the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model, especially given the fact that high performance software development lags well behind the much publicized advances in computing power.

The full story can be found on PSC’s website here.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 7th, 2005 at 9:37 pm and is filed under Scientific Applications, Hardware, Federally funded institutions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.