PRACE SoHPCProject title: InSitu visualisation of Navier- Stokes Tornado Effect (ID 1608), Anurag Dogra (TU Bergakademie Freiberg] Germany), CINECA supercomputing center, Italy
Visualisation of the enstrophy of a tornado
Due to its increased computing capacity, High Performance Computing (HPC) can provide a more accurate representation of the climate models. Using HPC can enable and enhance prediction of extreme weather conditions, and also the reasons and impacts.
Weather modelling is used to improve our understanding of how processes work in land, oceans and the atmosphere. It also helps us to understand the evolution and impact of climate changes over the years. Weather modelling also helps predict weather between days and seasons as well as weather projection for the future.
Hurricanes paths prevision
More accurate models are needed to predict much in advance the path and the effects of the increasingly devastating hurricanes such as Irma and Harvey. The weather model from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (UK) proved substantially more accurate than U.S.A. models in predicting the path of Hurricane Sandy that devastated America's East Coast in 2012. The MET Office, the UK’s National Weather Service, relies on more than 10 million weather observations from sites around the world, a sophisticated atmospheric model and a £30 million IBM supercomputer to generate 3,000 tailored forecasts every day.
European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts predicted the path of the Hurricane Harvey fairly well also. The EU model predicted the movement of Harvey with high precision for the next 5 days on whether it would stall or move further, the direction of movement and other such details which are very helpful to find the right solutions. The European modelling centre has used supercomputing facilities to devise the best system to incorporate real-time meteorological observations into its model which implies that the accuracy of initial conditions is quite high.
Tornadoes visualisation
During its Summer of HPC Programme, PRACE provides young researchers with an invaluable introduction to the world of high performance computing. One of the participants in the 2016 edition, Anurag Dogra, was tasked with creating in situ visualisations of tornadoes. Dogra used HPC resources of the Cineca Supercomputing Centre in Italy. With help from the researchers at Cineca, Dogra was able to produce a highly impressive in situ visualisation of the tornado effects. He has also created an interface that allows researchers to check the evolution of the analysed data in real time, with no need to download the data itself. The researcher, therefore, is able to analyse the progress of the process and interact in real time with the application – a non-trivial act to perform on high-performance systems. “This method can save the use of a lot of computational resources,” says Dogra. “This interface is particularly useful for anyone working with computational fluid dynamics applications and climate modellers.” Dogra presented the results of his research in a video.