Santander Meteorology Group

A multidisciplinary approach for weather & climate

Nowadays Grid Computing is powerful computational tool which is ready to be used
for scientific community in different areas (such as biomedicine, astrophysics, climate, etc.). However, the
use of this distributed computing infrastructures (DCI) is not yet common practice in climate research, and
only a few teams and applications in this area take advantage of this infrastructure. Thus, the WRF4G
project objective is to popularize the use of this technology in the atmospheric sciences area.
In order to achieve this objective, one of the most used applications has been taken (WRF; a limited- area
model, successor of the MM5 model), that has a user community formed by more than 8000 researchers
worldwide. This community develop its research activity on different areas and could benefit from the
advantages of Grid resources (case study simulations, regional hind-cast/forecast, sensitivity studies, etc.).
The WRF model is used by many groups, in the climate research community, to carry on downscaling
simulations. Therefore this community will also benefit.
However, Grid infrastructures have some drawbacks for the execution of applications that make an
intensive use of CPU and memory for a long period of time. This makes necessary to develop a specific
framework (middleware). This middleware encapsulates the application and provides appropriate services
for the monitoring and management of the simulations and the data. Thus,another objective of theWRF4G
project consists on the development of a generic adaptation of WRF to DCIs. It should simplify the access
to the DCIs for the researchers, and also to free them from the technical and computational aspects of the
use of theses DCI.
Finally, in order to demonstrate the ability of WRF4G solving actual scientific challenges with interest and
relevance on the climate science (implying a high computational cost) we will shown results from different
kind of downscaling experiments, like ERA-Interim re-analysis, CMIP5 models, or seasonal. WRF4G is
been used to run WRF simulations which are contributing to the CORDEX initiative and others projects
like SPECS and EUPORIAS.
This work is been partially funded by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and the Spanish
National R&D Plan 2008-2011 (CGL2011-28864)