AWS HPC Blog

Tag: Weather

How to Arm a world-leading forecast model with AWS Graviton and Lambda

The Met Office is the UK’s National Meteorological Service, providing 24×7 world-renowned scientific excellence in weather, climate and environmental forecasts and severe weather warnings for the protection of life and property. They provide forecasts and guidance for the public, to our government and defence colleagues as well as the private sector. As an example, if you’ve been on a plane over Europe, Middle East, or Africa; that plane took off because the Met Office (as one of two World Aviation Forecast Centres) provided a forecast. This article explains one of the ways they use AWS to collect these observations, which has freed them to focus more on top quality delivery for their customers.

Figure 1. A map of the USA showing the location of RITC participants and instructors for the Spring 2021 RITC Workshops.

Training forecasters to warn severe hazardous weather on AWS

Training users on how to use high performance computing resources — and the data that comes out as a result of those analyses — is an essential function of most research organizations. Having a robust, scalable, and easy-to-use platform for on-site and remote training is becoming a requirement for creating a community around your research mission. A great example of this comes from the NOAA National Weather Service Warning Decision Training Division (WDTD), which develops and delivers training on the integrated elements of the hazardous weather warning process within a National Weather Service (NWS) forecast office. In collaboration with the University of Oklahoma’s Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies (OU/CIMMS), WDTD conducts its flagship course, the Radar and Applications Course (RAC), for forecasters issuing warnings for flash floods, severe thunderstorms, and tornadoes. Trainees learn the warning process, the science and application of conceptual models, and technical aspects of analyzing radar and other weather data in the Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS).