CHPC - Research Computing and Data Support for the University

Turning Weather and Climate Research into Actionable Science

By Jon Meyer

Utah Climate Center, Department of Plants, Soils, and Climate, Utah State University

The Utah Climate Center, hosted by the College of Agriculture and Applied Sciences at Utah State University, serves a mission of weather and climate ‘research-to-operations’ (R2O). Within the backdrop of changing climate, the R2O initiative is meant to help facilitate academic endeavors that are focused on actionable science products. R2O is well suited to address the dynamic and ever-changing suite of climate service needs at the state and federal level.

Compute nodes on the NOTCHPEAK partition are employed by the Utah Climate Center to handle the collection of automated software platforms designed to perform external data ingestion and processing or run computationally intensive real-time operational forecast modeling. In the face of the recent extreme drought, the Utah Climate Center has focused on building a comprehensive Utah Drought Dashboard to better monitor and assess drought conditions. This dashboard (viewable at https://climate.usu.edu/service/index.php) integrates numerous internal and external sources of weather and climate information into a ‘one stop shop’ website. CHPC resources have shouldered a great deal of the computational backend needed to monitor drought conditions, with the recent implementation of real-time soil moisture mapping being a major accomplishment. Each day, station data is downloaded and quality controlled. Final form data points are directed to the Utah Climate Center’s servers, where daily maps of soil moisture conditions are hosted. The figure shows an example of the color-coded daily soil moisture observations. Behind this daily soil moisture map is a process that involves CHPC software that tabulates hourly soil moisture observations from approximately 225 surface weather station locations. 

In addition to data mining and processing, the Utah Climate Center also conducts real-time operational forecast modeling. While numerous forecast models are operated by NCEP, Utah’s complex terrain and intricate climate processes limit a great deal of forecast fidelity by the national models. CHPC resources allow the Utah Climate Center’s in-house modeling platforms to more closely focus on Utah’s highly nuanced weather patterns through a methodology called dynamic downscaling. Dynamic downscaling uses forecasted conditions from a coarse-resolution ‘parent’ forecast model to supply initial and boundary conditions for a higher resolution forecast domain placed inside the parent domain’s coverage. With complex terrain, the high resolution is especially important for Utah and leads to a much improved representation of weather and climate patterns.

For more information, see our Summer 2022 Newsletter.

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