Implementation of a limited area ensemble meteorological system in a grid environment

Climate changes due to global warming in the Mediterranean basin, ever more frequently, generate extreme meteorological events such as violent extra tropical storms characterized by wide-spread flooding and/or gale force winds. For this reason, there is an increasing demand for reliable probabilistic short range weather forecast. At regional scale these kinds of forecasts are even more valuable especially in cases of high impact weather that may bring about loss of lives and properties. To estimate the probability of a certain event to develop the Ensemble Prediction (EP) approach, in which single deterministic forecasts are combined using specific statistical techniques, is frequently used. These EP simulations are computationally very demanding, requiring a great amount of CPU time and large storage capacity. Moreover the run of an ensemble of forecasts is a time critical task which has to be completed in less than a couple of hours to be usable in an operational framework. In this short paper we discuss the results obtained in one of the WPs of the CYBERSAR project, financed by the Italian Ministry of Research (MIUR). A limited area ensemble system, based on the analysis and forecast of the 51 members of the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecast (ECMWF) EP System (EPS), has been ported on a GRID of the CYBERSAR project, using the gLite middleware, and tested for a couple of extreme events that hit the Sardinia region in the last months of 2008.

@InProceedings{MPPV09a,
  author       = {Marrocu, M. and Pusceddu, G. and Peneva, E. and Vargiu, A.},
  title        = {Implementation of a limited area ensemble meteorological system in a grid environment},
  booktitle    = {Proceedings Of The Final Workshop Of The Grid Projects Of The Italian National Operational Programme 2000-2006 Call 1575},
  pages        = {315--318},
  year         = {2009},
  organization = {Consorzio COMETA},
  address      = {Consorzio COMETA Via Santa Sofia 64 I-95123 Catania-Italy},
  note         = {isbn: 978-88-95892-02-3

idxproject: CyberSAR},
  keywords     = {eteorological forecast, EPS, LAM, Grid, gLite},
  url          = {https://publications.crs4.it/pubdocs/2009/MPPV09a},
}