Beth Plale

From deciding whether to carry an umbrella in the morning to helping an airplane pilot choose the best flight path, accurate and timely weather information is essential to keeping us comfortable and safe. Yet, as our global climate changes and local weather patterns change with it, understanding and predicting the weather has become an even greater challenge. Events of recent years have shown how weather can leave communities physically, emotionally, and financially devastated, underscoring just how critical accurate weather prediction can be.

With support from the National Science Foundation, a team of researchers from Indiana University's Pervasive Technology Institute (PTI) Data to Insight Center and the IU School of Informatics are helping weather scientists meet this challenge by providing easy access to cutting edge computational tools. Their collaborative project is called Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery (LEAD). The LEAD project provides a Web-based virtual organization and portal to scientific research tools for meteorologists, atmospheric scientists, and anyone who wants to interactively explore the weather as it evolves. The LEAD portal gives scientists access to high performance computing resources used to run large simulations, create forecast models, and mine and process data.

"Weather prediction is a sophisticated and advanced science," says Beth Plale, a professor of computer science, director of the Data to Insight Center, and principal investigator for the IU LEAD project. "Meteorologists should not be expected to be high-performance computing experts, too, in order to have access to the best computational tools available for weather prediction. Weather prediction is also a very collaborative science, one that can benefit greatly from the expertise of a community of experienced individuals. LEAD creates an online collaborative research community, and gives that community access to critical technology resources."

The LEAD portal frees scientists to focus on science. They do not have to learn complicated procedures or remember multiple passwords to log on and use state-of-the-art technology resources such as modeling and visualization tools, meteorological databases, and supercomputers and data storage on the TeraGrid, the National Science Foundation's network of high-performance computers. LEAD lowers the barrier of entry for these essential tools and allows even beginning meteorologists to use them effectively. The LEAD portal also has been used successfully by teams of meteorology students as part of the WxChallenge, the North American collegiate weather forecasting competition. Over a 10-week period, the students used tools available through LEAD to forecast temperatures, precipitation, and wind speeds for select cities across the United States.

The information accessible through LEAD has a wide variety of applications in industries ranging from air travel to large-scale construction planning. IU's LEAD project team has begun working with members of industry and government agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Federal Aviation Administration to adapt LEAD technologies for their operations.

To learn more about LEAD and to visit the portal see: https://portal.leadproject.org.