CAPS is the Primay Collaborator of an NSF Large ITR Grant

In mid-September the NSF formally announced the 8 awardees of the most recent round of Large Information Technology Research (ITR) grants. OU serves as the lead institution for the "Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery" (LEAD) initiative, which is an $11.25M, 5-year project. Collaborators include scientists and engineers from 7 other institutions besides OU: Colorado State University; Millersville University; Indiana University; University of Alabama, Huntsville; Howard University; UCAR; University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

LEAD's mission is to enable an integrated, scalable framework for use in accessing, preparing, assimilating, predicting, managing, mining/analyzing, and displaying a broad array of meteorological and related information, independent of format and physical location. In practical terms, this project will dramatically impact the capability to provide timely warnings of severe weather events by developing the dynamic computing and networking infrastructure required for on-demand detection, simulation and prediction of high-impact local weather such as thunderstorms.

A transforming element of LEAD is dynamic workflow orchestration, which will allow the use of analysis tools, forecast models, and data repositories not in fixed configurations or as static recipients of data, as is now the case, but rather as dynamically adaptive, on-demand systems that can a) change configuration rapidly and automatically in response to the weather; b) continually be steered by new data; c) respond to decision-driven inputs from users; d) initiate other processes automatically; and e) steer remote observing technologies to optimize data collection for the problem at hand.

CAPS will contribute significantly to the LEAD effort in the following areas: administration; new hazardous weather detection algorithms; forecast initialization using cycling methods; storm-scale ensemble work.

Further information on LEAD can be found at the project's main website: http://lead.ou.edu.