RDFS Rapid Deployment Forecast System

Visit at:http://rdfs.stccmop.org

Registration required

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RDFS – Currently 22 forecasts 24/7

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RDFS - Goals

• Generate operational forecast of sufficient quality providing results within 24 hours of receipt of a computational grid

• Foster a community of interested parties empowered to maintain and improve each forecast

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RDFS – Infrastructure

The central RDFS host is a repository for model results and a provider of some model inputs such as atmospheric forecasts. Products both static and dynamic are delivered via a locally hosted web server.

Compute servers execute one or more forecasts. Presently RDFS has 9 multi-CPU compute servers. Generally, one CPU is dedicated for each forecast.

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RDFS - Grids

• Grid Generation– Requires bathymetry– Imagery, coastal outlines– Requirements, particular features

represented in the domain– Determine open, land boundaries– Grid creation using SMS, ACE/gredit, or

other provider, e.g. use of an existing grid

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RDFS – Boundary Conditions

• Open boundary conditions– Ocean

• Tidal model for elevation BCs• Regional model forcings for flux, salinity,

temperature, elevations• Fresh water inputs

– Streams, rivers» Real time data source – e.g. USGS stream flow

network» climatology for river flux and temperature so

always have data for inputs.

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RDFS – Atmospheric forcings

• Atmospheric forecasts

– NCEP North American Mesoscale (NAM)• 3 day forecast 12km grid resolution• Use for most coastal US forecasts

– NCEP Global Forecast System (GFS)• 10 day forecast 75km resolution but covers the

entire globe.

Both forecast are downloaded daily and converted to file formats understood by the models

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RDFS - Models

• ELCIRC – 3D baroclinic circulation across river-to-

ocean scales implemented using a finite-volume/finite-difference Eulerian-Lagrangian algorithm

• SELFE– (Semi-implicit Eulerian-Lagrangian Finite

Elements) a 3D baroclinic circulation model.

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RDFS - Execution

• Execution of daily forecast– Crontab entries on compute nodes for

each forecast• Simlink.pl

– Creates directory structure for the day’s forecast

• Prep.pl– Gathers inputs for the model run

• Check.pl– Verifies inputs are correct

• Start.pl– Executes forecast

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RDFS – Monitoring and alerting

• 24/7 on a budget• Systems monitored by Big Brother,

disk free, CPU state, uptime• E-mail alerts on success or failure• Critical fault alerts passed to pagers

carried by forecast team members

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RDFS – Pre-generated Products

• Processing and product generation– Master_process.pl

• Runs as a daemon on compute nodes• In a loop executes scripts to:

– Extract model data at stations– Extract realtime data from a relational database

store– Create model and model/data comparison plots at

stations– Create isoline plots of variables over the domain

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RDFS – Pre-generated Products

• Model/data comparisons

• Isolines

• Transects

• Many other types

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RDFS - Mapserver

• Mapserver– Web application for rendering spatial

data home at http://ms.gis.umn.edu/– Model output data for each forecast can

be viewed with the RDFS mapserver deployment

– Additional layers from navigation charts, USGS topo maps, USGS ortho-photos, shapefiles

– Can generate animations

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RDFS - Mapserver

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RDFS - Drupal

• Drupal is an open source web site content management system used as an application framework in support of RDFS.– http://www.drupal.org– Provides user management functions– Menus, forums, blogs and other useful

content types

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RDFS - Drupal

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RDFS – Going Forward

• Upcoming parallel version of SELFE changes infrastructure– Computes nodes become compute

cluster– Larger domains possible– Smaller time steps possible– Need more disk to store results

• Challenges building a community of interested parties