Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

Three independent equipment systems are requested to support weather-forecast research for mountainous western Canada.      (1) One is a computer server (4 processors at 3 GHz, a 1 TB 10-disk RAID array, 16 GB of memory), which will replace an obsolete, failing computer that holds a weather database called Emergency Weather Net.  This server needs to reliably store up to a terabyte of online databases of hourly field data received continuously from about 3000 weather stations.  For each observation it also stores paired forecasts from 16 different numerical weather prediction (NWP) models (computer codes that solve the fluid-dynamics equations for the atmosphere).  It also stores calibration coefficients and verification statistics for the same combination of sites, observations, and forecasts.      (2) The second system is an experimental piece of computer hardware that includes 2 Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) along with 4 conventional computer CPUs.  FPGAs are special computer chips that can be hardware configured to perform repeated calculations exceptionally fast.  The point of this research is to enable faster numerical computation, thereby allowing more accurate and timely forecasts at finer resolution with better approximations to physical processes such as clouds, turbulence, and mountain effects.      (3) The third system is a set of 10 inexpensive, commodity weather stations, to be deployed in the Greater Vancouver Area.  Via our previous NWP model runs we discovered many small-scale weather patterns that cause extreme variations in weather (hazardous fog, rainfall, pollutant transport, strong winds) across short distances.  We hope to confirm and better predict these weather patterns with field data from a more closely-spaced network of surface weather stations in this population centre of 2 million people.