Numerical weather prediction for clean energy, transportation, special events and natural disasters
Automated weather forecasts tailored for clients in Canada. Expertise in ensemble numerical weather modelling, mountain meteorology, air-quality meteorology, hydrometeorology, sports meteorology and coastal meteorology.
- Real-time weather-forecast maps and animations spanning all of Canada/ with horizontal granularity as fine as 1.3 kilometres in western Canada, including new forecasts for the Canadian Arctic,
- Weather-forecast data files in various formats (GRIB/ NetCDF/ Vis5D/ CALMET/ etc.) for use as input to other models,
- Data and graphs predicting temperature/ wind/ humidity/ precipitation/ sunshine-clouds out to eight days,
- Statistical post-processing of weather forecasts: ensemble average/ probability forecasts/ bias correction/ ensemble calibration/ analog ensembles/ recent climatologies and verifications,
- Tailored products such as electric-load forecasts/ reservoir-inflow forecasts/ wind-turbine hub-height forecasts/ road-weather forecasts/ smoke-spread forecasts and ski-slope forecasts,
- Reforecasts of critical events or case studies at high resolution (up to 0.1 kilometre horizontal granularity),
- Deployment of automated weather stations and management of weather databases,
- Development of new numerical methods/ such as computational acceleration with graphics processing units/ Lagrangian dynamical cores/ higher-order turbulence closure/ etc.,
- Automated delivery of forecast products via secure web/ FTP/ emails/ etc.
- Aerospace and satellites
- Agriculture, animal science and food
- Clean technology
- Construction (including building, civil engineering, specialty trades)
- Defence and security industries
- Energy (renewable and fossil)
- Environmental technologies and related services
- Forestry and forest-based industries
- Healthcare and social services
- Ocean industries
- Professional and technical services (including legal services, architecture, engineering)
- Tourism and hospitality
- Transportation
- Utilities
Specialized Labs and Equipment
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Name of specialized lab |
Name of equipment |
Description of function |
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Geophysical Disaster Computational Fluid Dynamics Centre |
400+ core high-performance computer cluster with high-speed switches optimized for computational fluid dynamics and numerical weather prediction (NWP). Many tens of peripheral file servers, RAID arrays, web servers, database servers, graphics processors, tape backups and development computers. Operational reliability is enhanced with additional smaller forecast and database machines that provide redundancy. |
This “single lab” resource is dedicated to large NWP runs that can each take many hours on hundreds of cores. Operational twice-daily real-time NWP runs are initialized from 00 UTC and 12 UTC National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) initializations. We currently run numerical models called WRF, MM5 and MC2 as multi-model, multi-initial-condition, multi-grid-resolution ensembles. Other hours each day are used for case-study research runs and parallel development runs. We specialize in tailoring the forecast domain and output products to the needs of our clients.
Access to Compute Canada’s HPC resources |
Private and Public Sector Research Partners
- BC Hydro
- BlueSky-Canada (forest-fire smoke)
- 2010 Winter Olympics Own the Podium
- Environment and Natural Resources Ministries (British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario)
- Forestry and transportation companies and ministries
- Environmental consulting firms
- Regional and local governments
- Orchards and vineyards
- Federal agencies (Natural Resources Canada, Environment Canada, Department of National Defence)
- Educational institutions (The University of British Columbia, British Columbia Institute of Technology, University of Northern British Columbia)
- International organizations (U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research)
Additional Information
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Title |
URL |
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Real-time ensemble weather forecasts |
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Geophysical Disaster Computational Fluid Dynamics Centre: What we do, how we do it, who we are, who benefits, etc. |