Testing has begun on two variants of the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model to determine the best candidates that will be part of a six member ensemble slated to become the operational weather prediction model for the National Weather Service in October 2004. A testing procedure has been identified in the WRF test plan that will require 1255 tests to compare the two variants. Many other WRF variants and model ensembles have been proposed for future comparisons that will likely require thousands of additional tests. The management of software, data and tests will require significant resources at multiple super-computing sites both during initial WRF testing and for successive model research and development. To simplify this process, the Forecast Systems Laboratory has begun development of a WRF portal that will be used for the test, evaluation and verification of changes made to the WRF model.
A portal is broadly defined to be a gateway in which users can access and utilize distributed compute resources (eg. systems, data, network) without regard to what or where they are. Both grid and web technologies will be used in the development of a WRF portal. Grid technologies will be employed to provide a powerful and flexible way to access and combine resources from multiple institutions so that tests can be run or data results can be obtained more efficiently. Web technologies will be used to simplify access to the WRF model for testing and evaluation by the larger meteorological community. The portal will incorporate all the elements of end-to-end model testing including initialization, model forecast , post-processing, and verification. In designing the portal, accessibility, extensibility, software management, data management, user interface, and security issues will be considered.
A paper describing the preliminary design and motivation for this development is available for feedback / comments. The next step in this development is to design a user interface that will encompass requirement given by potential users of this portal.
We are currently leveraging the efforts of Mike Dvorak and John Taylor at Argone National Laboratories in the development of a prototype portal. They helped develop a grid application called espresso which is capable of running models at Argonne. Further development of the prototype include porting the wrf enabled version of espresso to the Argonne machines and attempting to run model applications across the Argonne grid.