Advanced Tornado Modeling

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One of my passions is weather. I love the dynamics of weather. No, I don’t like destruction or loss of life. That is sad. But severe weather is a fact and understanding it can save lives. Robert Wilhelmson and his team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, or NCSA, have come up some really good help in the fight against severe weather. One of the major problems in modern storm investigation is that our equipment can’t give us a great understanding of internal dynamics of severe storms. This is especially true of tornadic storms because of their relative rarity. But the NSSL Collaborative Model for Multiscale Atmospheric Simulation, or NCOMMAS, is set to change all that.

In 2003, Manchester, South Dakota was annihilated by a tornado. Lou Wicker, who developed NCOMMAS off of an earlier model of Wilhelmson’s, approached Wilhelmson about modeling that storm. So, armed with a massive amount of atmospheric date, Wicker and team set about to enter it into the storm modeling program. To accomplish the massive amount of computation required, they enlisted the services of NCSA’s IBM p690 computing cluster. The model pounded 16 processors for eight straight days to give them 2 1/2 storm hours of modeling.

The resultant 650 billion bytes of data gave them snapshots of the storm on almost every conceivable level. Values for temperature, wind, humidity, pressure, etc. can be plotted on three-dimensional grids. Obviously, this gives scientists tons of ammo in the fight against storms. This was the first time that a “super tornado”, one that last for many minutes on the ground at F4 or F5 level, was modeled from formation to death. These types of tornadoes only occur 5% of the time, but they account for 80% of fatalities. This type of modeling is a move toward pinpoint prediction of these killers. And that is something I can get very excited about.

Click here to view the model in action.

Source: “Hunt for the Supertwister, Trish Barker, NCSA”

[tags]advanced tornado modeling, NCOMMAS, Robert Wilhelmson, Lou Wicker[/tags]

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