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Supercomputers Help Researchers Improve Severe Hail Storm Forecasts (nsf.gov)
aarondubrow writes: Researchers working on the Severe Hail Analysis, Representation and Prediction (SHARP) project at the University of Oklahoma used the Stampede supercomputer to gain a better understanding of the conditions that cause severe hail to form, and to produce hail forecasts with far greater accuracy than those currently used operationally. The model the team used is six times more resolved that the National Weather Service's highest-resolution forecasts and applies machine learning algorithms to improve its predictions. The researchers will publish their results in an upcoming issue of the American Meteorological Society journal Weather and Forecasting.
I'm a bit jealous of your supercomputers. I'm three states to the north of you, in the Big Ten Conference, and I run jobs on the supercomputers at my school. I'm limited to 2,000 cores on each of two clusters. And I fuss about the queue to no end. I'm a meteorologist who runs lots of numerical simulations as well as doing many other things.
Part of warn-on-forecasting is also trying to get better data into our weather models. We have lots of data right at the surface, but not a whole lot above the ground. That's very important, especially in the first 1,500 meters or so. One of the things I'm working on is using drones to collect data around severe storms within the first 1,000 meters above the ground and using that data to improve forecasts.
There are some big projects going on in the meteorological community, with one of our big goals being the ability to reliably issue warnings with 30-120 minutes of lead time (warn-on-forecast). Not directly related, but the field phase of PECAN (Plains Elevated Convection At Night) just wrapped up in July 2015. That's for the purpose of better understanding nocturnal storms that produce heavy rainfall and severe weather. There's also VORTEX-SE (Verification of the Origin of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment - Southeast) based out of Huntsville, Alabama, which is going on right now. It's similar to VORTEX (1994/1995), VORTEX99 (smaller campaign in 1999) and VORTEX2 (2009/2010), but targeting storms in the Southeast, which frequently produce tornadoes but in very different environments compared with their counterparts in the Plains.