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North Carolina Grid Demo Description The summer and fall tropical cyclone activity in the Atlantic ocean demands accurate operational forecasts of tidal and storm-surge water levels along the US Eastern and Gulf coasts. To address the need for real-time surge prediction systems, the North Carolina team is developing a real-time storm-surge prediction system based on a service-oriented architecture. This surge prediction system has several distinguishing characteristics. It is grid computing-based, and hence distributed, and interoperable. It also computes the storm-surge forecasts in a timely manner, thereby enabling emergency management and hazard planning along the US East and Gulf coasts. Recognizing that one model solution, driven by one hurricane pressure and wind field forecast realization, may not represent the optimal simulation of a specific storm-surge forecast, the SCOOP system uses an ensemble of wind forcing for a specific hurricane forecast track. Unidata's Local Data Manager (LDM, an event-driven data distribution system) is used at each participating site to select, capture, manage and distribute data products. Each ensemble member is used to compute a storm surge forecast using the finite element tidal and storm-surge model ADCIRC. The computational load for the ensemble water level calculations is distributed over resources located at different sites. Once the input data arrives at the primary site, resources for each ensemble run are discovered, based on current computer resource load and availability of participating computer systems. The resource selection module queries each site's Information Service for the real-time status information on queuing structure and current computational load. The required surge model input files and application programs are then staged to the best available resource and the forecast simulation is executed. The ensemble of surge computations are inserted back into the SCOOP LDM stream for subsequent analysis and visualization. For accounts to the NC SCOOP Portal please email scoop-support at renci dot org. |