Each year across the United States, floods, tornadoes, hail, strong winds, lightning and winter storms—what meteorologists call mesoscale weather events—cause many deaths, routinely disrupt transportation and commerce, and result in annual economic losses greater than $13 billion.
Unfortunately, the information technology framework that is used by most researchers and working meteorologists to respond to weather emergencies has little ability to adapt to weather conditions that change rapidly and dramatically. By the time new data is collected and new forecasts distributed, it is often too late to disseminate timely severe weather warnings or to reroute air traffic to avoid costly delays.
The Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery (LEAD) project aims to change that. The goal of LEAD is to create an interactive, adaptable system for accessing and utilizing meteorological data, forecast models, and analysis and visualization tools. Using a simple portal environment, LEAD brings together all the resources needed to do weather forecasts that adapt quickly as conditions change. The LEAD portal is aimed at scientists, meteorologists in the field and educators and their students, providing tools for identifying, accessing, preparing, assimilating, predicting, managing, analyzing, mining and visualizing a broad array of meteorological data and model output, independent of format or the location of the user.
RENCI focuses on two areas for LEAD: performance monitoring and adaptation; and fault-tolerance, performability and recovery for the distributed LEAD environment. For the first, RENCI is developing site-level performance monitoring, focusing on monitoring and measuring the distributed data streams needed for data assimilation and distributed execution. The second focus area emphasizes fault monitoring and rescheduling to ensure continued execution of distributed applications. The RENCI work will enable the LEAD infrastructure to react to crucial changes in weather conditions or to changing resource availability allowing the system to proactively assess and detect anomalies.
The interconnected environment of data, computational and analytical resources, software packages and tools for collaboration and visualization are collectively known as the LEAD cyberinfrastructure. Cyberinfrastructure is the support structure for science, just as highways and railroads support transportation or water, sewer and electrical lines comprise infrastructure for cities. For LEAD, cyberinfrastructure includes the sensors, radars and other instruments that collect data, the software applications used to manipulate and analyze it, and the supercomputers and visualization programs that turn data into models and forecasts–all linked via high performance networks and easily accessible through a Web portal. With LEAD, meteorologists, researchers, educators, and students are no longer passive bystanders or limited to static weather data and pre-generated images. They are active participants who can acquire and process their own data.
LEAD is a five-year Large Information Technology Research (ITR) Grant from the National Science Foundation that began on October 1, 2003. It is a multidisciplinary effort involving nine institutions and more than 100 scientists, students and technical staff. For more see the LEAD website.
