scholarly journals Data-driven global weather predictions at high resolutions

Author(s):  
John A Taylor ◽  
Pablo Larraondo ◽  
Bronis R de Supinski

Society has benefited enormously from the continuous advancement in numerical weather prediction that has occurred over many decades driven by a combination of outstanding scientific, computational and technological breakthroughs. Here, we demonstrate that data-driven methods are now positioned to contribute to the next wave of major advances in atmospheric science. We show that data-driven models can predict important meteorological quantities of interest to society such as global high resolution precipitation fields (0.25°) and can deliver accurate forecasts of the future state of the atmosphere without prior knowledge of the laws of physics and chemistry. We also show how these data-driven methods can be scaled to run on supercomputers with up to 1024 modern graphics processing units and beyond resulting in rapid training of data-driven models, thus supporting a cycle of rapid research and innovation. Taken together, these two results illustrate the significant potential of data-driven methods to advance atmospheric science and operational weather forecasting.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Taylor ◽  
Pablo Larraonndo ◽  
Bronis de Supinski

Abstract Society has benefited enormously from the continuous advancement in numerical weather prediction that has occurred over many decades driven by a combination of outstanding scientific, computational and technological breakthroughs. Here we demonstrate that data driven methods are now positioned to contribute to the next wave of major advances in atmospheric science. We show that data driven models can predict important meteorological quantities of interest to society such as global high resolution precipitation fields (0.25 degrees) and can deliver accurate forecasts of the future state of the atmosphere without prior knowledge of the laws of physics and chemistry. We also show how these data driven methods can be scaled to run on super-computers with up to 1024 modern graphics processing units (GPU) and beyond resulting in rapid training of data driven models, thus supporting a cycle of rapid research and innovation. Taken together, these two results illustrate the significant potential of data driven methods to advance atmospheric science and operational weather forecasting.


2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 257-281 ◽  
Author(s):  
Piet Termonia ◽  
Claude Fischer ◽  
Eric Bazile ◽  
François Bouyssel ◽  
Radmila Brožková ◽  
...  

Abstract. The ALADIN System is a numerical weather prediction (NWP) system developed by the international ALADIN consortium for operational weather forecasting and research purposes. It is based on a code that is shared with the global model IFS of the ECMWF and the ARPEGE model of Météo-France. Today, this system can be used to provide a multitude of high-resolution limited-area model (LAM) configurations. A few configurations are thoroughly validated and prepared to be used for the operational weather forecasting in the 16 partner institutes of this consortium. These configurations are called the ALADIN canonical model configurations (CMCs). There are currently three CMCs: the ALADIN baseline CMC, the AROME CMC and the ALARO CMC. Other configurations are possible for research, such as process studies and climate simulations. The purpose of this paper is (i) to define the ALADIN System in relation to the global counterparts IFS and ARPEGE, (ii) to explain the notion of the CMCs, (iii) to document their most recent versions, and (iv) to illustrate the process of the validation and the porting of these configurations to the operational forecast suites of the partner institutes of the ALADIN consortium. This paper is restricted to the forecast model only; data assimilation techniques and postprocessing techniques are part of the ALADIN System but they are not discussed here.


2014 ◽  
Vol 24 (01) ◽  
pp. 1450003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xavier Lapillonne ◽  
Oliver Fuhrer

For many scientific applications, Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) can be an interesting alternative to conventional CPUs as they can deliver higher memory bandwidth and computing power. While it is conceivable to re-write the most execution time intensive parts using a low-level API for accelerator programming, it may not be feasible to do it for the entire application. But, having only selected parts of the application running on the GPU requires repetitively transferring data between the GPU and the host CPU, which may lead to a serious performance penalty. In this paper we assess the potential of compiler directives, based on the OpenACC standard, for porting large parts of code and thus achieving a full GPU implementation. As an illustrative and relevant example, we consider the climate and numerical weather prediction code COSMO (Consortium for Small Scale Modeling) and focus on the physical parametrizations, a part of the code which describes all physical processes not accounted for by the fundamental equations of atmospheric motion. We show, by porting three of the dominant parametrization schemes, the radiation, microphysics and turbulence parametrizations, that compiler directives are an efficient tool both in terms of final execution time as well as implementation effort. Compiler directives enable to port large sections of the existing code with minor modifications while still allowing for further optimizations for the most performance critical parts. With the example of the radiation parametrization, which contains the solution of a block tri-diagonal linear system, the required code modifications and key optimizations are discussed in detail. Performance tests for the three physical parametrizations show a speedup of between 3× and 7× for execution time obtained on a GPU and on a multi-core CPU of an equivalent generation.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Piet Termonia ◽  
Claude Fischer ◽  
Eric Bazile ◽  
François Bouyssel ◽  
Radmila Brožková ◽  
...  

Abstract. The ALADIN System is a numerical weather prediction system (NWP) developed by the international ALADIN consortium for operational weather forecasting and research purposes. It is based on a code that is shared with the global model IFS of the ECMWF and the ARPEGE model of Météo-France. Today, this system can be used to provide a multitude of high-resolution limited-area model (LAM) configurations. A few configurations are thoroughly validated and prepared to be used for the operational weather forecasting in the 16 Partner Institutes of this consortium. These configurations are called the ALADIN Canonical Model Configurations (CMCs). There are currently three CMCs: the ALADIN baseline-CMC, the AROME CMC and the ALARO CMC. Other configurations are possible for research, such as process studies and climate simulations. The purpose of this paper is (i) to define the ALADIN System in relation to the global counterparts IFS and ARPEGE, (ii) to explain the notion of the CMCs and to document their most recent versions, and (iii) to illustrate the process of the validation and the porting of these configurations to the operational forecast suites of the Partner Institutes of the ALADIN consortium. This paper is restricted to the forecast model only; data assimilation techniques and postprocessing techniques are part of the ALADIN System but they are not discussed here.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Birgit Sützl ◽  
Gabriel Rooney ◽  
Anke Finnenkoetter ◽  
Sylvia Bohnenstengel ◽  
Sue Grimmond ◽  
...  

<p>Urban environments in numerical weather prediction models are currently parameterised as part of the atmosphere-surface exchange at ground-level. The vertical structure of buildings is represented by the average height, which does not account for heterogeneous building forms at the subgrid-level. The use of city-scale models with sub-kilometre resolutions and growing number of high-rise buildings in cities call for a better vertical representation of urban environments.</p><p>We present the use of a newly developed, height-distributed urban drag parameterization with the London Model, a high-resolution version of the Met Office Unified Model over Greater London and surroundings at approximately 333 m resolution. The distributed drag parameterization requires vertical morphology profiles in form of height-distributed frontal area functions, which capture the full extent and variability of building-heights. These morphology profiles were calculated for Greater London and parameterised by an exponential distribution with the ratio of maximum to mean building-height as parameter.</p><p>A case study with the high-resolution London Model and the new drag parameterization appears to capture more realistic features of the urban boundary layer compared to the standard parameterization. The simulation showed increased horizontal spatial variability in total surface stress, identifying a broad range of morphology features (densely built-up areas, high-rise building clusters, parks and the river). Vertical effects include heterogeneous wind profiles, extended building wakes, and indicate the formation of internal boundary layers. This study demonstrates the potential of height-distributed urban parameterizations to improve urban weather forecasting, albeit research into distribution of heat- and moisture-exchange is necessary for a fully distributed parameterization of urban areas.</p>


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