Scientists try to improve weather predictions

Two scientists at IU have been chosen to develop a mechanism that will better aid predictions of "mesoscale weather events" -- a term used by scientists to denote tornadoes, hurricanes and other natural catastrophes. \n"This mechanism will help save many lives," said computer scientist Dennis Gannon, one of the two scientists selected by the National Science Foundation to lead this project. \nNSF has awarded Gannon and fellow scientist Beth Plale $1.5 million this October to carry out the project, which is part of a bigger program called Linked Environment for Atmospheric Discovery. \nEach year across the United States, floods, tornadoes, hail, strong winds, lightning and winter storms cause hundreds of deaths, routinely disrupt transportation and commerce, and result in annual economic losses greater than $13 billion. Earlier this year, Hurricane Isabel tore through the East Coast. It killed 29 people, left millions in the dark and left behind a trail of destruction that amounted to around $1 billion. Gannon said some of this destruction could be able to be stopped with better forecasting.\nAt the moment, weather forecasts are generated from a series of data packets from satellites with a lot of weather information lost between each packet. The new forecasting system, based on what is called grid computing, will take advantage of improvements in high-speed networking and computer power to simultaneously process volumes of data from satellites, supercomputers and weather records.\n"The challenge," said Gannon, "will be to design a dynamic management system that will process a broad array of meteorological data and create simulations."\nSimulations are computer-generated sketches of events. Gannon's mechanism will help the computer to pinpoint "one single most-probable simulation" of the path of a tornado. Based on this information, the computer will send warnings to the exact towns and populated regions that would come in the path of the tornado. It will also alert the right people and authorities to take action quickly. \n"This will all be done without someone having to monitor a computer constantly," said an excited Gannon.\n"The new framework will allow real time data about storms to be fed into the forecasting models as they run," said Plale. "Currently, the long running models cannot be updated quickly once they begin to run." \nRecently, IU and Purdue University successfully linked their supercomputers to form the Indiana Virtual Machine Room. The computers will be linked over I-Light, a high-performance, optical fiber network, and will allow the computers to perform over a trillion operations per second. Gannon and Plale plan to utilize this network, called the TeraGrid, for the project.\nAt the moment, the two scientists and their nine-member team at the computer science department are designing a smaller version of the mechanism to test computers and supercomputers in Indiana. Based on the success of this new mechanism for forecasting tornadoes on the state level, Gannon's team will put it to use on a national scale. The LEAD project will tentatively roll out in 2008, said Gannon.\nGrid computing is touted as the next big thing after the Internet, and it was IU's computer science department's expertise that led to this funding by the National Science Foundation.