Mission and Goals of CAPS

In December, 1988, the National Science Foundation established the Science and Technology Centers (STC) Program in response to concerns that the U.S. was losing its competitive edge in scientific pursuits that have important technological consequences. Through relatively stable, long-term funding, these centers were designed to investigate problems that have considerable economic and societal impact, require collaboration among disciplines, are too broad for the single-investigator mode of research, and have long-term objectives that cannot be reasonably met using the traditional mode of 1 to 3 year grants. It was hoped that these centers, based exclusively at academic institutions, would establish rather broad collaborations with private sector and government agencies and, as a result, substantially reduce the amount of time between basic discovery and practical utilization.

The Center for Analysis and Prediction of Storms (CAPS), located at the University of Oklahoma and one of the first 11 S&T centers funded, has as its mission the development of techniques for the practical prediction of weather phenomena on scales ranging from a few kilometers and tens of minutes (individual thunderstorms) to hundreds of kilometers and several hours (storm complexes and mesoscale systems). More specifically, CAPS postulates that the location (to within a few miles) and intensity of new thunderstorms and their associated severe weather (hail, strong winds, heavy rain) can be predicted up to 4 hours in advance, while the detailed evolution of existing storms can be foreseen for periods of up to 12 hours. The emphasis of the program has now been broadened to include wintertime weather as well.

CAPS envisions its research culminating in a prototype data acquisition, assimilation, and numerical prediction system appropriate for regional storm-scale prediction, with the single-Doppler radar network as the principal data provider. Two major events during the mid 1980's provided the impetus for creating CAPS and for moving from a mode of storm simulation to one of prediction. The first was a national, multi-agency program to place some 160 scanning Doppler radars around the U.S. by the end of this decade (the NEXRAD Program, formally known as the WSR-88D network), providing nearly continuous single-Doppler coverage of spatial and temporal scales relevant to storm prediction. The second development, concerns techniques pioneered at OU for retrieving unobserved quantities from single-Doppler radar data to yield a consistent set of mass and wind fields appropriate for initializing a storm-scale prediction model.

If CAPS is successful in demonstrating the practicability of storm-scale prediction on a regional basis, and if its methodologies are implemented and supported nationally either by the Federal Government or by private sector companies or both, the United States will take a major step forward in the prediction of hazardous weather. Forecasts generated by regional storm-scale models will be used to determine boundary-layer winds for the safe application of pesticides and for accidents involving toxic materials. Private and commercial transportation will reap important benefits from short-term forecasts, particularly commercial aviation. We estimate that commercial airlines alone could, with accurate regional forecasts both enroute and in the terminal area, save several tens of millions of dollars each year in revenues presently lost to unanticipated weather delays and traffic re-routing. Accurate forecasts of electrical storms will aid re-routing and switching by power and communication utilities, and recreational facilities will be able to provide advance warning of approaching severe weather. Numerous benefits concerning logistical planning and support will be available to the defense and space flight communities and to their associated programs. The primary beneficiary, however, will be the general public, whose personal security and living standards will be improved by better warnings of dangerous and troublesome weather.

CAPS is providing to the scientific community a new, extensively-documented and professionally- written hydrodynamical model that accommodates a number of resolution- and accuracy-enhancing strategies via adaptive gridding and advanced numerical algorithms. This model, the fourth version of which is nearing formal release, is portable among architectures including those of the massively parallel variety. Further, the code is modular for the sequential introduction of improved physics, is adaptable to foreseeable data assimilation strategies, and is currently being used as an educational resource in numerous disciplines, including applied mathematics and computer science. CAPS is also providing to the scientific community several methods for assimilating data into time-dependent models, many of which are directly applicable to oceanography and other areas of fluid dynamics. Innovative methods for overcoming obstacles to the assimilation problem, such as solution singularities, large regions of missing data, and computational inefficiencies, have been and continue to be developed, and results to date using real data are encouraging.

As is the case for all NSF centers, CAPS has developed and relies heavily upon collaborations with other groups and centers for meeting its overall scientific and technological objectives. Active collaborations are currently underway with scientists at the following institutions and companies: the Center for Research on Parallel Computation (CRPC) at Rice University (an S&T Center whose mission is to develop software tools for the use of massively parallel computers); the Supercomputer Computations Research Institute (SCRI) at Florida State University; the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA); the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR); the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL); the Norman National Weather Service Forecast Office (NWSFO) and its Experimental Forecast Facility (EFF); the Oklahoma Climatological Survey; the Army High Performance Computing Research Center (AHPCRC) at the University of Minnesota; the NOAA Forecast Systems Laboratory (FSL) in Boulder, Colorado; the Northeast Parallel Architectures Center (NPAC) at Syracuse University; Thinking Machines Corp. (TMC), and Cray Research, Inc. (CRI).

In addition to its base funding from the NSF, CAPS has been extremely fortunate to receive large yearly supplements (on the order of 25% of its base) from the Federal Aviation Administration. This support has been directed toward accelerating our development of techniques for retrieving the three-dimensional wind field from single-Doppler radar data, and for developing algorithms to characterize the intensity of potentially hazardous (to aircraft) turbulence using Doppler spectrum width data.

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