Content about Atmospheric science

Feature - Can a digital earth save the planet?

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Ash spewing from Iceland’s volcano, “Eyjafjallajoekull’ in 2010, in an image from the European Space Agency’s Envisat satellite. Image courtesy ESA (European Space Agency).

With climate change hot on the agenda, activists, scientists and politicians are looking into what can be done to provide a united front against this global issue.
At the 8th e-Infrastructure Concertation Meeting, held at CERN last Thursday and  Friday, a networking event organized by the European Commission (EC), one such project aims to consolidate the various Earth sciences. Their work could reduce the loss of life and property due to natural disasters, and help us better understand how our planet’s climate is changing.
Ground European Network for Earth Science Interoperations - Digital Earth Community (GENESI-DEC) is focused on providing a virtual resource for scientist

Feature - The forecast before the storm
How supercomputers and hybrid workflows helped beat tornadoes to the chase

A Doppler On Wheels collects data in a tornado during VORTEX2, as PI Nolan Atkins stands nearby collecting photogrammetric data.
Image courtesy of VORTEX2.

Chasing tornadoes won’t get you very far, if your goal is to understand how tornadoes form. To get results, researchers need to get their instruments on the ground before the tornado touches down.
That’s the big catch 22 of VORTEX2 (Verification of the Origins of Rotation in Tornadoes Experiment), according to principal investigator Joshua Wurman. Current techniques predict tornadoes an average of only 13 minutes in advance, a fact that makes it difficult to evacuate or properly prepare for the impending disaster. To improve that lead time, or learn how to predict how destructive a tornado will be, scientists need data recorded as the tornadoes form.
“In order for us to collect good data we had t

Feature - On a grid and a prayer

Predictect rainfall in cm (color scale) over the Indonesian island of Java and part of Sumatra. Magnitude and strength of the wind at ten meters about the ground is also shown.

In Indonesia, weather forecasts powered by grid computing are being distributed twice a day using Google Maps, along with Imsakiyah, the calendar of Muslim prayer times as well as an earthquake update.
Because Indonesia straddles the equator, the temperature is roughly constant all year round — typically a balmy 28°C in coastal regions. So, the most interesting part of a weather forecast is usually how much rain it predicts.
There are often torrential rains between December and March, when the monsoon winds blow from the north and west, while some parts of the country suffer drought when dry air blows north from the Australian continent, between June and September.
Predicting local rainfall is, however, a tricky business, as sudden tropical storms are a typic

Feature - Seeing particles with VPM

VPM Interview from Renaissance Computing Institute on Vimeo.

Before we can make use of data, we need to make sense of it. But with complex concepts such as particulate air pollution, you could just as easily drown in the data.
And that’s exactly what was happening when NASA first approached Uma Shankar, an atmospheric scientist at the Institute for the Environment at UNC Chapel Hill, to ask what sort of advanced visualizations the particulate matter research community needed.
After some thought, Shankar suggested an application to visualize particulate matter across the range of sizes in which it occurs.
“Particulate matter has such important impacts on a variety of air quality issues, especially human health” Shankar explained. “Now we better understand the connection between particulate matter and climate, so its importance is even greater than we originally understood.”
Despite this better understanding, the existing visu

Feature - Forecasting weather on the grid

This image shows the 10 meter wind field on 24 April 2006 at 1300 UTC (1400 h local time). During the early afternoon, a sea breeze flow reached its maximum intensity. Over the land, the wind is rather irregular due to very complex topography. Wind speeds mostly varied in the range of 3.5 m/s to 5 m/s along the Adriatic coast (e. g., Šibenik, Split, Makarska, Dubrovnik). At the land measuring sites, the sea breeze was developing from the southwest direction. The island’s measuring sites, however, showed the significant influence of the northwesterly large-scale wind. Image courtesy of Davor Davidovic.

The Weather Research and Forecasting prognostic model (WRF) is an atmospheric simulation system that runs on parallel computing platforms. It is designed with the goal of being flexible, portable, and efficient.
Within the field of meteorology, the Advanced Research WRF (ARW) is one of today’s best-known weather research an

Case study: The GeoChronos web portal

Surface reflectance and ocean temperature, an example of Earth observation science. Image courtesy of Jacques Descloitres, MODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA/GSFC.

When GeoChronos launches, it will serve up a buffet of scientific and social networking ingredients that together empower Earth observation scientists to collaborate and make new discoveries.
The GeoChronos recipe didn't come out right the first time, however. The path the GeoChronos team has followed provides valuable insight into the process of creating a scientific web portal.
“The idea is that scientists can come to a portal where they process and share their data without having to worry about the overall technical details of how that’s being done,” said Cameron Kiddle, a research fellow for the Grid Research Centre at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada.
Social networking features and collaborative tools are a must for the project, and so the first GeoC

Feature - Clearing the air: solving an atmospheric controversy with DEISA

The PINNACLE project tests climate models. Image courtesy UCAR

Scientists seeking to develop models for predicting weather, climate and air quality have long been confronted with the fundamental problem of how to accurately forecast the height of the atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) as it develops during daytime heating.
In an attempt to solve this controversy, a team of scientists from the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, together with Imperial College London and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, initiated the PINNACLE project, using the resources of the DEISA grid of supercomputers.
The ABL is the lower layer of the atmosphere, the part which we live in. Its height grows throughout the day, from a few hundred meters in the morning to one kilometer or more in the afternoon. The ABL has a large Reynolds number (a measure of the turbulence of the system), which me

Image of the Week - Watch a tornado

Large-Eddy simulation of a tornado's interaction with the surface. Image courtesy Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center

Just what does the interior of a tornado look like as it swirls over the land?
To find out, researchers W.S. Lewellen, D.C. Lewellen and Aytekin Gel of West Virginia University made high resolution, fully 3-D simulations in an attempt to answer questions about the character of the turbulent eddies in this unique flow.
The following animated clip, made by Gel in close cooperation with the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center’s (PSC) Scientific-Visualization Group, uses particle advection to represent wind direction and isosurfaces to show pressure inside a 400 m x 400 m x 400 m domain from a simulation involving approximately 100 hours of a Cray C90 supercomputer at PSC.
As a resource provider in TeraGrid, a National Science Foundation program of coordinated cyberinfrastructure for education and research, PSC works with its T

Feature - Forecasting an El Niño a half-century in advance

When a strong El Niño develops across the tropical Pacific, it can influence weather and climate as far away as the southern polar region. This occurs via a “wave train” of areas with unusually high or low pressure in the upper atmosphere (H’s and L’s) that leads to warmer-than-normal temperatures in West Antarctica. Bright reds near the equator show the unusually warm sea-surface temperatures (SSTs) associated with an El Niño during 1940-41. There are no SST data for that period for the portions of the Southern Ocean shown here. Analysis of ice cores drilled in West Antarctica (red dots) reveals that air temperatures there warmed by as much as 10° Fahrenheit as this three-year-long El Niño unfolded, then dropped by as much as 13° F afterward. Illustration courtesy Steve Dey/copyright University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. Image on previous page courtesy Takje/stock.e

Opinion - Engaging UK researchers

Some of the things that ENGAGE has been involved in include software for the Aladin2 project, which allows for a simple, fast-running model of the Earth’s climate system. Image courtesy National Snow and Ice Data Center/World Data Center for Glaciology, Boulder, Colorado

It is risky to second-guess your users. There can be a difference between what we think our users need, and what they actually need. This is especially the case when trying to create technological platforms that enhance researchers’ ability to generate, collect, share, analyze, store and retrieve information; this is a young technology with a multi-disciplinary research base that can change focus with lightning speed. To counter this problem, the UK’s universities of Southampton, Edinburgh and Manchester (represented by OMII-UK, of which I am a part) and the National Grid Service  began the ENGAGE project. The goal was to create a picture of the computational need

Image of the week - Emergency management at your fingertips   Image courtesy of RENCILed by Jessica Proud, a project team from the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) has partnered with the North Carolina State Climate Office and the National Weather Service to develop and deploy NC-FIRST. NC-FIRST is a program designed to help first responders and county emergency managers decipher weather data, understand weather threats and choose actions that minimize the threats to lives and property caused by extreme weather. This customizable Web portal environment aggregates information — radar imagery, watches and warnings and surface observations — from a wide range of weather Web sites, satellites and radars into a format that is easy-to-use — and easy to carry.

  Image of the week - GlobAerosol Aerosols are tiny particles suspended in the air, and they are a fundamental component of the Earth's atmospheric chemistry. Knowing their distribution and density is vital to improving the accuracy of air quality forecasting and predicting. But tracking where aerosols come from, where they tend to collect, and where they tend to “sink” on a planetary scale is a tricky busines. (Due to wind and weather patterns, sometimes the most pristine, remote areas accumulate the most aerosols.) However, by coordinating European Space Agency satellite data through BeinGrid, researchersat GMV are able to make maps such as the one above as part of the GlobAerosol project. (Black represents no aerosols, purple is some aerosols, and red is the most aerosols.)  Image courtesy of GlobAerosol