UCSD's Supercomputers Cast Light on Cloudy Puzzle of Global Weather
Record heat waves, exceptionally powerful hurricanes, destructive tsunamis, and melting icecaps have many discussing the weather, but can anybody do anything about it?
The first step towards any solution is understanding the problem, and that鈥檚 where the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) 鈥� in separate collaborations with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Colorado State University 鈥� applies its heavy-duty number-crunching expertise.
With both Livermore Lab and Colorado State 鈥� recent recipient of a $19 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to establish a Science and Technology Center 鈥� SDSC is working to thoroughly describe and model the role of clouds and other atmospheric phenomena, with the eventual goal of accurate worldwide forecasts.
SDSC, an organized research unit of the University of California, San Diego, has partnered with Livermore since 2005 on an advanced scientific data-management project dedicated to both global climate modeling and cosmology simulations of the early universe. Tim Barnett, of UC San Diego鈥檚 Scripps Institution of Oceanography, leads the climate-modeling effort; Michael Norman leads the cosmological research at UC San Diego.
鈥淥ur work with the Livermore Lab uses global climate modeling to determine the impact of climate changes on water supply,鈥� said Barnett. 鈥淲e鈥檒l answer the question: Can we detect a global warming signal in main hydrological features of the Western United States? This will involve making runs of global climate and downscaling models that will be unprecedented in scope.鈥�
The collaboration with Colorado State was announced in July, with UC San Diego鈥檚 John Helly, laboratory director for earth and environmental sciences at SDSC, named co-principal investigator. That work will also be, in many ways, unprecedented.
鈥淭he characterization of clouds is a major limitation in current climate models,鈥� Helly said, discussing the urgency of such research. 鈥淲ith this award, the Center for Meso-scale-modeling of Atmospheric Processes is provided the opportunity to advance the accuracy and precision of atmospheric models. SDSC will play a key role in making this problem computationally tractable, as well as in disseminating the voluminous, high-resolution model results to the research and education community.鈥�
SDSC brings powerful tools to both partnerships. Available resources
include production data-management systems as well as development environments for creating and testing next-generation software. The production-data environment includes supercomputers, archival storage systems, high-performance disk arrays, commodity-based disk systems, data-management platforms, database platforms and advanced visualization systems. SDSC capabilities include peak 15-teraflops-capable systems, a 18-petabyte tape archive, and 1.5 petabyte on-line high-performance data-handling systems that can move data at rates from 1 to 7 gigabytes a second.
The center is a node on the Teragrid, and its hardware and software systems support the Scripps Institution of Oceanography鈥檚 SIOExplorer digital library, the Real-Time Observatories Network data grid, the NSF鈥檚 National Science Digital Library persistent archive, the Joint Center for Structural Genomics data grid, the Alliance for Cell Signaling digital library, the UC San Diego Libraries鈥� ArtStor image collection, and the Southern California Earthquake Center digital library, among other institutions and resources.
Can those massive computing abilities make enough sense of the unpredictable atmosphere to enable timely, and life-saving, forecasts? Scientists admit that even with today鈥檚 leading-edge resources, simulations still cannot capture the full complexity of the global-scale patterns of the weather.
But Colorado State鈥檚 David Randall, professor of atmospheric science and director of the newly funded NSF Science and Technology Center, believes his institution and the SDSC have developed a prototype model with significant promise.
鈥淥ur model allows scientists to take a two-dimensional model of a collection of clouds and apply the behavior of those clouds to each of the thousands of 鈥榞rid columns鈥� of a global atmospheric model,鈥� he said. 鈥淭he project will make it possible to produce more robust simulations of both next week鈥檚 weather and future climate change.鈥�
Fran Berman, director of the SDSC, sees great benefits to the partnerships with Livermore and Colorado State. "To understand a force as dynamic and complex as the Earth's atmosphere -- or something as ephemeral as a cloud -- today involves simulations with massive computing resources and data collections. SDSC is delighted to participate in the new Science and Technology Center with our partners, and we look forward to the new discoveries that will ensue from this collaboration."
Source: By Paul Mueller, University of California, San Diego
