CHPC - Research Computing and Data Support for the University

Pando Object Storage Archive Supports Weather Research

By Brian K. Blaylock¹, John D. Horel^1&2, Chris Galli^1&2

¹Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Utah; ²Synoptic Data, Salt Lake City, Utah

Terabytes of weather data are generated every day by gridded model simulations and in situ and remotely sensed observations. With this accelerating accumulation of weather data, efficient computational solutions are needed to process, archive, and analyze the massive datasets. The Open Science Grid (OSG) is a consortium of computer resources around the United States that makes idle computer resources available for use by researchers in diverse scientific disciplines. The OSG is appropriate for high-throughput computing, that is, many parallel computational tasks. This work demonstrates how the OSG has been used to compute a large set of empirical cumulative distributions from hourly gridded analyses of the High-Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) model run operationally by the Environmental Modeling Center of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction. The data is being archived within Pando, an archive named after the vast stand of aspen trees in Utah. These cumulative distributions derived from a 3-yr HRRR archive are computed for seven variables, over 1.9 million grid points, and each hour of the calendar year. The HRRR cumulative distributions are used to evaluate near-surface wind, temperature, and humidity conditions during two wildland fire episodes—the North Bay fires, a wildfire complex in Northern California during October 2017 that was the deadliest and costliest in California history, and the western Oklahoma wildfires during April 2018. The approach used here illustrates ways to discriminate between typical and atypical atmospheric conditions forecasted by the HRRR model. Such information may be useful for model developers and operational forecasters assigned to provide weather support for fire management personnel.

Read the article in the Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology.

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