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2004 NEWS AND HIGHLIGHTS
10.28.04 - NASA Model Tracks 2004 Hurricane Season
Throughout the 2004 hurricane season, the finite-volume General Circulation Model (fvGCM) running on NASA's new Columbia system, has been cranking out valuable real-time numerical weather prediction (NWP) targeted at improving hurricane track and intensity forecasts.
The NWP suite includes a data preprocessor, the fvGCM code, postprocessor, and hurricane tracking packages. The high-resolution (approx. 25km) weather prediction suite was ported and integrated on Columbia by Bo-Wen Shen, Jiun-Dar Chern, and Bill Putman of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) in August 2004. Since then, twice daily, real-time weather forecasts are run on one 512-processor node of Columbia, the new 10,240-processor SGI Altix system operated at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility.
Lead by Dr. Robert Atlas of the Laboratory for Atmospheres at GSFC, members of the fvGCM modeling group are assessing the model's accuracy in predicting the landfall of hurricanes up to five days in advance. The team has achieved accuracy in predicted landfall (approx. 100 km) and storm intensity, with an advance warning of three to five days - based on simulation results for hurricanes Frances, Ivan, and Jeanne. The five-day forecast for hurricane Ivan accurately predicted intensity to be a strong Category Four hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale, making landfall on the Gulf coast of Alabama as an intense Category Three storm.
The combination of the fvGCM's track and intensity accuracy with a high level of consistency foretells great potential for the high-resolution application of this state-of-the-art global weather/climate prediction model. Pairing fvGCM's exceptional computational efficiency and NASA's increase in computing resources via the Columbia supercomputer provides a mechanism that allows intense computational problems such as this to be solved much more quickly than ever before.
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NEWS ARCHIVE
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