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Don’t trust the weatherman? Running my own weather forecast on Windows HPC Server (Rain is coming back to Seattle Monday)

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One of the interesting things living in Boulder Colorado for almost 20 years is that I bump into NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research), NOAA(National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), and CU Boulder researchers on a daily basis. I have asked people numerous times about how the weather forecast software works and they’ve always told me it’s complicated to run.

Well, not anymore. Partnering with a former Intel engineer, and the mighty power of my now 3 years old Cray cx1, we were able to download data from NCAR, run the WRF simulation code, and plot out weather for tomorrow (5/2, 5/3 of 2011).

Of course, it’s not without issues. We’ve been working on it for at least a month and a half by now in our spare time. Many of these software packages are designed to run on Unix and have been around for the last 20+ years. Porting the simulation software, posting the processing software onto Windows, and Ironing out all the bugs was a two-year effort that involved several other volunteers. Thank you!

I would like to spare you from having to read a thick book worth of details and show you the results instead. Basically, we used WRF, WPS (post processing), wget (ftp), NCAR Graphics, and a shell script to connect everything together. We’ve simplified it down to a command line tool with only 3 parameters: longitude, latitude and number of days. The rest has been automated (duct taped).

 

forecast –longitude –latitude –num_of_days

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Downloading big data sets from noaa.

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Computing the forecast!

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Submitting the simulation part of the job.

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The on premise nodes that got allocated get BUSY.  WRF sure does scale well on a cluster.

NCAR graphics post processing on precipitation.

plt_Precip.000014

plt_Precip.000021

Rain is coming, we’ll get some on Monday ……

plt_Precip.000032

More rain Tuesday….

Compute on a single Node varies from 1.5 hours to 3 hours.  I didn’t measure my multi-node runs yet. 

Thanks for reading my blog, and we’ll continue to report our progress of making this into a service / package for you to try.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    May 02, 2011
    Pretty sweet. Can you tell me when its going to be sunny in Seattle?

  • Anonymous
    July 14, 2011
    The comment has been removed