IBM demonstrates Deep
Thunder at the American Meteorological Society 2001 conference
The capabilities developed and utilized over the last
three years in various venues were employed at the American Meteorological
Society 2000 Conference (AMS 2001: January 14 - 19, 2001 in Albuquerque,
NM). Deep Thunder was demonstrated in the IBM booth (number
217) as part of the conference's technical exhibition. The system
was adapted to the Albuquerque area. The visualization portion
was also presented in the AMS Etheater at noon on Tuesday, January
16.
Nested forecasts at 16, 4 and 1 km resolution (areas of
976x976, 244x244 and 61x61 km in size, respectively) were produced.
This time, they were centered over Albuquerque (specifically at the
Convention Center). They were tied to multi-resolution visualizations
to make live predictions during the conference. This is similar to
what was done at the previous AMS conference.
These capabilities are critical for a number of commercial Deep Thunder
applications, where the domain of the forecast is tailored to the geographic
region of interest enabling one to "zoom in" on predictive forecasts.
The system was running in parallel on five 375 MHz 4-way POWER3 nodes
for compute and an additional 200 MHz cpu for I/O. A 48-hour forecast
required about 4 hours to complete for all three
geographic nests. Three workstations (one IBM RS/6000 44P-270 and
two IBM Intellistation Z-Pros) and two laptops (IBM Thinkpads 770Z and
600E) were available to interact with the model and analyze results.
Each of these nests are shown in the images below that.
Each of the images show a terrain surface colored by temperature,
overlaid with arrows showing wind direction and colored by speed, as well
as local maps. Cities are marked and predicted temperatures are shown
at each location.
The first image is for the outer nest at a resolution
of 16 km.
The next image is from the 4 km nest.
The next image is from the 1 km nest.
The performance and resolution enhancements were mapped
to three distinct visualization and analysis applications. In addition
to general improvements, the visualization tools were adapted for multi-resolution
operations via a new method to encapsulate access to nested data.
A 3d facility for interactively browsing model results and tracking the
simulation was used to create the images and animations above, which includes
flyover and time-based animation of various weather variables, and "snapshots"
for web access as orbit displays, PanoramIX scenes, simplified VRML geometry
and images. Two applications for the analysis of the post-processed
model output provided complementary facilities. One is focused on
the entire 3d model domain while the other emphasizes surface and upper
atmospheric layers. Details about these visualization applications
are available in a paper for you to read.
A paper (9.3) on one aspect of the visualization
portion of the work was presented in the Interactive and Information
Processing System conference on Wednesday, January 10 at 2:15 pm.
Additional details about the results, many visualization
examples, including animations, and comparisons to observations and other
forecast models will be posted here in the near future.
lloydt@us.ibm.com
Last updated January 10, 2001
