OpenIFS@home version 1: a citizen science project for ensemble weather and climate forecasting
<p>Weather forecasts rely heavily on general circulation models of the atmosphere and other components of the Earth system. National meteorological and hydrological services and intergovernmental organizations, such as the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), provide rou...
| Main Authors: | , , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Copernicus Publications
2021-06-01
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| Series: | Geoscientific Model Development |
| Online Access: | https://gmd.copernicus.org/articles/14/3473/2021/gmd-14-3473-2021.pdf |
| Summary: | <p>Weather forecasts rely heavily on general circulation models of
the atmosphere and other components of the Earth system. National
meteorological and hydrological services and intergovernmental
organizations, such as the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather
Forecasts (ECMWF), provide routine operational forecasts on a range of
spatio-temporal scales by running these models at high resolution on
state-of-the-art high-performance computing systems. Such operational
forecasts are very demanding in terms of computing resources. To facilitate
the use of a weather forecast model for research and training purposes
outside the operational environment, ECMWF provides a portable version of
its numerical weather forecast model, OpenIFS, for use by universities and
other research institutes on their own computing systems.</p>
<p>In this paper, we describe a new project (OpenIFS@home) that combines
OpenIFS with a citizen science approach to involve the general public in
helping conduct scientific experiments. Volunteers from across the world can
run OpenIFS@home on their computers at home, and the results of these
simulations can be combined into large forecast ensembles. The
infrastructure of such distributed computing experiments is based on our
experience and expertise with the climate<i>prediction</i>.net (<span class="uri">https://www.climateprediction.net/</span>, last access: 1 June 2021) and
weather@home systems.</p>
<p>In order to validate this first use of OpenIFS in a volunteer computing
framework, we present results from ensembles of forecast simulations of
Tropical Cyclone Karl from September 2016 studied during the NAWDEX field
campaign. This cyclone underwent extratropical transition and intensified in
mid-latitudes to give rise to an intense jet streak near Scotland and heavy
rainfall over Norway. For the validation we use a 2000-member
ensemble of OpenIFS run on the OpenIFS@home volunteer framework and a
smaller ensemble of the size of operational forecasts using ECMWF's forecast
model in 2016 run on the ECMWF supercomputer with the same horizontal
resolution as OpenIFS@home. We present ensemble statistics that illustrate
the reliability and accuracy of the OpenIFS@home forecasts and
discuss the use of large ensembles in the context of forecasting extreme
events.</p> |
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| ISSN: | 1991-959X 1991-9603 |