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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / SEPTEMBER 29, 2003: VOL. 2 NO. 39
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Applications:
NCSA COLLABORATES ON NSF REAL-TIME
WEATHER PREDICTION PROJECT
The National Science Foundation (NSF) announced that $11.25 million has
been
awarded to a project that will improve researchers' ability to study and
predict dangerous weather. The NSF Information Technology Research grant will
support the Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery (LEAD) project,
online at lead.ou.edu, in which the
National Center for
Supercomputing
Applications (NCSA) will collaborate with the University of Illinois and seven
other institutions.
"Each year severe weather causes hundreds of deaths across the United
States
and costs billions of dollars," NCSA Director Dan Reed said. "LEAD will give
weather researchers the robust, flexible cyberinfrastructure they need to
better understand and better predict these destructive events."
LEAD will allow researchers, educators and students to run atmospheric
models
and other tools in much more realistic, real-time settings than is now
possible.
"Our ultimate goal is to create a system that takes full advantage of all
the
atmospheric data that is constantly being collected, the power of
supercomputers, and the speed of high-performance networks," said Bob
Wilhelmson, a senior research scientist at NCSA and a co-principal
investigator with LEAD. "Being able to analyze this data in real-time and
constantly update our models and forecasts could help us pinpoint where a
tornado is likely to occur or where a hurricane will hit land."
Currently, weather forecasting models typically run on fixed schedules over
fixed regions, regardless of weather conditions. The LEAD project will develop
Grid computing environments for on-demand detection, simulation and prediction
of thunderstorms, tornadoes and other destructive weather. With LEAD, users
will be able to access, manage, analyze and display data; their desktop
computers will connect them to a broad array of tools and to national
databases. Dynamic orchestration tools will allow the system to automatically
respond to evolving weather by ingesting data at the most crucial times.
For example, a better understanding of the conditions that create tornadoes
could lead to improved prediction and more timely, accurate warnings, saving
lives and reducing the economic toll of these severe storms. A researcher
pursuing this goal could use the LEAD portal to access and sort years of data
stored in national databases. This culled data could be stored at distributed
sitesincluding NCSAwhere the LEAD components will be developed and tested.
Data assimilation and data mining tools could then be used to further refine
and categorize the information.
Based on the data, the researcher will be able to develop hundreds of
numerical simulations of storms to understand in more detail why some storms
produce tornadoes and some do not. Using data mining tools, the researcher
will be able to sift the hundreds of terabytes of output from these
simulations, rapidly gaining insight into the conditions that are most likely
to produce tornadoes. Ultimately, the researcher will be able to move beyond
simulations based on historical data to running real-time forecasts with
streaming data feeds. The LEAD system will enable identification of
thunderstorms as they form, automatically triggering data-gathering tools,
requesting Grid computing resources, and generating results as the weather
unfolds.
NCSA will integrate the components of LEAD as they are developed at various
institutions and is also one of five sites acting as a Grid- and Web-service
testbed. The plan is for LEAD's features to be tested and rolled out in three
phases over five years.
LEAD's principal investigator is Kelvin Drogemeier at the University of
Oklahoma, a long-time NCSA collaborator. The other institutions collaborating
on LEAD are Colorado State University, Howard University, Indiana University,
Millersville University, the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research,
the University of Alabama and the University of Illinois.
NCSA's Reed is also a key researcher on another project that received an
$8.25
million ITR grant. The goal of the virtual Grid application development
software (VGrADS) project is to develop software to simplify and accelerate
the development of Grid applications and services. The LEAD project is one of
the collaborative application targets of the VGrADS effort.
For more on this year's ITR grant recipients, see
www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/news/03/pr03103.htm. For more
information
on the
grant program, see www.itr.nsf.gov/.
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