Cyberinfrastructure for Sustained Scientific Innovation - Software Elements: Cloud WRF for the Atmospheric Research and Education Communities

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This award supports the establishment of an officially-supported version of the Weather and Research Forecast (WRF) model in the cloud environment. WRF is the world's most popular numerical weather prediction model and is supported by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) for a community of users across universities, research labs, and operational weather centers. This project will address fundamental issues such as modeling system accessibility, improvement of model support to the research and educational user communities, student and scientist training, and facilitation of model development. Given WRF's prominence in both atmospheric research and real-time weather forecasting, this work will not only promote the advancement of science, but also will contribute to the vigor of development and application of one of the nation's cyberinfrastucture (CI) assets, a key weather prediction model used at operational centers and for public purposes. Furthermore, this project will contribute to education at minority-serving institutions and will yield tools to better the training of new generations of the nation's atmospheric scientists. Lastly, the project will leverage the resources and support of commercial cloud service providers to serve these national interests, in a collaboration of the principal researchers with industry.The viability of running the WRF in the cloud has been previously demonstrated, and this project would advance the field by configuring and supporting the official version of the WRF in the cloud, with an up-to-date, cloud-configured version of the WRF system code synced to the WRF GitHub repository. Other materials that will be available include the WRF tutorial materials and system documentation, WRF input and output datasets, and the WRF Testing Framework code analysis package. The project will produce a configured and documented cloud WRF system that will open a new arena for model use and that will enhance the efficiency of both user support and the integration of contributed model improvements. This cloud capability will exploit an emerging common cyber-ground to facilitate code development for the target model and allow for critical reproducibility in code analysis and testing. It will advance the delivery of modeling system tutorials, and thus scientist training and education, through establishing globally-accessible modeling spaces, enhancing instruction portability and access, decreasing costs for host institutions, and improving usability of on-line materials. These new cloud capabilities will be addressing bottlenecks in model support and development, and once developed, the CI can be adapted for other community models, thus benefiting other scientific disciplines and their tools via its reuse.This award by the NSF Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure is jointly supported by the Cross-Cutting Program within the NSF Directorate for Geosciences.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.