SERVICE-ORIENTED ENVIRONMENTS FOR DYNAMICALLY INTERACTING WITH MESOSCALE WEATHER

by Kelvin K. Droegemeier, et al.

Each year across the US, mesoscale weather events—flash floods, tornadoes, hail,
strong winds, lightning, and localized winter storms—cause hundreds of deaths, routinely disrupt transportation and commerce, and lead to economic losses
averaging more than US$13 billion. Although mitigating the impacts of such events
would yield enormous economic and societal benefits, research leading to that
goal is hindered by rigid IT frameworks that can’t accommodate the real-time,
on-demand, dynamically adaptive needs of mesoscale weather research; its disparate, high-volume data sets and streams; or the tremendous computational demands of its numerical models and data-assimilation systems.

In response to the increasingly urgent need for a comprehensive national
cyberinfrastructure in mesoscale meteorology—particularly one that can
interoperate with those being developed in other relevant disciplines—the US
National Science Foundation (NSF) funded a large information technology
research (ITR) grant in 2003, known as Linked Environments for Atmospheric
Discovery (LEAD). A multidisciplinary effort involving nine institutions and more
than 100 scientists, students, and technical staff in meteorology, computer
science, social science, and education, LEAD addresses the fundamental research
challenges needed to create an integrated, scalable framework for adaptively
analyzing and predicting the atmosphere. report.pdf