Meteo Prototype
- TIGGE Archive Centres and Data Providers
Application Background
This work package focuses on the development of Grid-based access to the European and Chinese copies of a TIGGE database, a multi-terabyte data repository containing near-real-time global model outputs from numerical weather prediction centres worldwide.
Two major research challenges of the 21st century are to reduce and mitigate natural disasters and to realise the societal and economic benefits of improved weather forecasts. A large international research project, THORPEX (THe Observing system Research and Predictability Experiment) was started in 2004 in response to these challenges. THORPEX provides the research underpinning the World Meteorological Organisation’s Multi-Hazard Prevention Strategy to halve the number of deaths due to meteorological, hydrological and climate-related natural disasters over the next 15 years.
The key component of the GIFS is the THORPEX Interactive Grand Global Ensemble (TIGGE). The goal of TIGGE is to collect in near real-time and store in a common format the outputs of global ensembles (10 currently) run to around 14 days. These outputs would are available to researchers in operational centres and academic communities.
Within BRIDGE the ECMWF hosts the European copy of the TIGGE database, while the China Meteorological Administration (CMA) hosts the Asian copy.
The BRIDGE project provides the partners of the meteorology activity with an opportunity to address the development of the next phase of TIGGE in which the data archives are distributed over a number of repositories, instead of all being held centrally (as in the first phase), but efficient and transparent access to users is maintained.
The aim of the meteorology activity in BRIDGE is to build an infrastructure to provide distributed access to the TIGGE databases at ECMWF and CMA. This infrastructure will be used to explore ways of creating probabilistic forecast products in a distributed fashion. The main challenge comes from the sheer volume of data involved: methods had to be found to use the data efficiently with minimal data transfers.
The Meteorological application has been a significant contribution to TIGGE project whilst at the same time assessing and promoting available European Technology for this high profile international research programme and the resulting future Global Interactive Forecasting System.
The Meteo workpackage's objective is the implementation and deployment of GRID enabled services at CMA and ECMWF, allowing researchers worldwide to discover and retrieve data from the TIGGE databases, as well as the provision of simple analysis services, such as statistical computations, to be performed at the data location.