U.S. Numerical modeling to get a significant boost

[baroclinic_instability]

Surprised this hasn't been discussed yet. Pretty awesome.

 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2013/05/15/game-changing-improvements-in-the-works-for-u-s-weather-prediction/

 

Snippet from CWG:

 

 

"Congress has approved large parts of NOAA’s spending plan under the Disaster Relief Appropriations Act of 2013 that will direct $23.7 million (or $25 million before sequestration), a so-called “Sandy supplemental” to the National Weather Service (NWS) for forecasting equipment and supercomputer infrastructure.

“This is a breakthrough moment for the National Weather Service and the entire U.S. weather enterprise in terms of positioning itself with the computing capacity and more sophisticated models we’ve all been waiting for,” said Louis Uccellini, director of the National Weather Service.

Last year, criticism began to emerge concerning the inferior accuracy of the NWS’s Global Forecast System (GFS) model – run on earlier versions of the supercomputers – compared to the model run at the European Centre for Medium Range Forecasting (ECMWF) based in the United Kingdom. The GFS and ECMWF models are, by far, the most heavily relied on by meteorologists around the world for forecasting.

Cliff Mass, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington and expert in numerical weather prediction, called the standing of the GFS model “third-rate” and “a national embarrassment” in a March 2012 blog post.

“It is a huge story, an important story, but one the media has not touched, probably from lack of familiarity with a highly technical subject,” Mass wrote.

But when the ECMWF model outclassed the GFS model in its long-range forecasts for Hurricane Sandy in late October, the accuracy discrepancy between the models caught the media’s attention.

“The American model is the basis for many forecasts, and its reliability problems beyond the short term suggest something major is amiss with its physics and inputs,”wrote USA Today in an editorial. “The European model’s embarrassing superiority on Sandy ought to accelerate efforts to identify and fix what’s wrong.”

The supercomputer running the GFS model in Reston, Va., known as Tide (National Weather Service).

The $23.7 million in improvements to NWS’s forecasting systems from the Sandy supplemental will facilitate a more than ten-fold increase in the capacity of the supercomputer running the GFS model.

“This is an extraordinarily positive development and will give the National Weather Service the potential to lead the world in numerical weather prediction,” Mass said in an email Tuesday.

In technical terms, the computing capacity will ramp up from 213 teraflops to 2,600 teraflops by the 2015 fiscal year according to the NWS. (Teraflops are simply a measure of the number of trillion calculations the computer can perform per second.) The NWS expects ECWMF’s supercomputer to have a capacity of 2,217 teraflops at that same time.

“By 2015, we will exceed the ECMWF in operational computing capacity with NOAA operational computers for the first time since the late 1980s or early 1990s,” Uccellini said.

The increased computing power will enable drastic improvements in the GFS model’s resolution Uccellini said. Higher resolution models pick up on weather features a lower resolution might miss, like some high altitude steering currents. (Model resolution defines the geographic size of grid boxes in which models perform calculations. The smaller the grid box, the better the model can simulate localized features.)"

[isohume]

Surprised this hasn't been discussed yet. Pretty awesome.

 

http://www.americanwx.com/bb/index.php/topic/39707-lou-uccellini-promises-big-us-model-upgrades/