Supercomputers Race to Predict Storms

pillageplunder writes "CNN has an interesting article on how different supercomputers from around the world are working to predict large storms tracks. The 3 days it takes now has been cut in half. Cool read."

Comments

More details on Fleet Numerical's iron

[green pizza]

http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_rel eases/2004/june/fleet_numerical.html

NOAA

[garretwp]

I currently work for NOAA at a facility called GFDL. We house some of the super computers here. I currently operate and control the computers and its deffinitly a treat to be able to work with these fast machines. We have some of the worlds fastest computers here and they compete very well with the earth simulator. We also have some of the top hurricane guys working for us as well. It is good to see that the techonology that we use is getting publicity. It will inform everyone how things are done and where they get the information from.

Fortran, yay!

[green pizza]

You don't know too many scientists-turned-programmers do you? Fortran is still alive and well in scientific circles. Companies like IBM and SGI still write and optimize Fortran compilers for their newest CPUs. Even Intel recently released a major update to their P4 and Itanium2 Fortran compilers.

Re:Fortran?

[GraWil]

They are written in Fortran because that is what they have always been written in. Keep in mind that we are talking of at least tens of thousands of lines and in some cases a few hundred thousand lines of complicated math. This isn't one of those things you port to C or C++ in an afternoon. Also note that most of these models are written by scientists (physicists/chemists) not computer scientists. Most groups now have programmers on staff to help with problems but scientific programming isn't always about having elegant code; more often then not, we care about the output and Fortran does just fine. Yes, we do mix in C where appropriate.

Relevant links from weather geek bookmarks

[Council]

You can see the current predictions by each model at any given time here:
http://www.weatherunderground.com/tropical/trackin g/at200406_model.html

The NHC discussion of the model guidance for each storm is here, under 'discussion' for each storm:
http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/

They explain why they're agreeing with or discounting each model in their overall forecasts.

Generally, it's difficult to find much prediction of hurricane tracks that doesn't come somehow from the NHC. This isn't because there aren't independent analysists, but because they try not to send mixed signals, which might lead to people not evacuating when they should. The raw information from the computer models is the closest you get to dissenting opinions, afiak.

You have to wonder..

[dfj225]

To a casual observer of the weather, like me, it seems that the paths of the hurricanes are little more than extrapolations of the current path with a slight bend to the east. For the hurricanes this year, it seems that time and again the models proved wrong for last minutes changes to the storm. I know from family who lives on the west coast of Florida that many people were caught off guard by Charlie. I really think that it is probably impossible to accurrately predict the path of a storm. I mean I could take a look at the motion of the storm and guess about as accurately as the models guess. My same family that was caught off guard by Charlie headed to Orlando when Ivan was about a week away, but the storm didn't land near their house. If you think about it, 3 days notice is not enough to have every person in a metropolis patch up their houses and move to higher ground. Some might say that everyone with the possibilty of getting hit by the storm should prepare, but imagine having to board your windows every 3 weeks or so only to be missed by the storm. It would be even worse if you evactuated on the same schedule. This would make it very difficult to live a normal life. Honestly, the prediction of storms like hurricanes needs to get much better, but I doubt that it ever will.

See the models

[theCoder]

As a resident of Florida (who's so far been pretty lucky with respect to the hurricanes), I've taken a keen interest in these models. The best place I've found to see them is at Weather Underground. Each listed storm has a "Computer Models" link at the end. See

Ivan
Jeanne.

Since the pages auto-refresh, I've just been leaving them up in a tab in Mozilla and checking them every once and a while. Though the models aren't always accurate and tend to change a lot, they kind of give you a feel for where the storm is probably going to go.

Re:Twister

[Orp]

I'm modeling supercells that produce tornadoes (well, almost) using supercomputers... does that count?

A talk I just gave a few days ago on this is found at the below link. Both in OpenOffice and PPT format. Note: the mpegs in that directory are BIG (1024x768) but they are very cool animations of supercells (raytraced with POV-Ray) and tornado-like circulations.

http://research.orf.cx/uw2004

Leigh Orf