By Jim Estep
Almost every morning before I go to work, I watch the local weather. It’s mostly out of habit, but it does help me decide if I should take an umbrella. When we were planning our beach vacation this year, I was very interested in the hurricane predictions. Of course, I had to schedule everything several months in advance, so if a hurricane did form, I would pretty much be out of luck. I watched The Weather Channel every day leading up to the vacation for the slightest hint of a tropical storm; nothing like a little hurricane roulette to spice things up a bit.
While I may make light of my personal use of the five-day forecast, weather prediction is no joking matter. Accurate weather predictions can literally mean the difference between life and death. Major weather events such as Hurricane Katrina have made that clear for all of us. It can also have significant economic ramifications.
My awareness of the importance of weather prediction has increased substantially over the last several years due to the presence of a National Weather Service (NWS) operation located at the NASA Independent Verification & Validation (IV&V) Facility in the I-79 Technology Park. A subgroup of the NWS called the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) established a backup of the NWS weather supercomputer at the NASA IV&V Facility thanks in large part to Congressman Alan B. Mollohan.
The NWS operation in Fairmont is intended to provide the computing and communications equipment needed to assume the workload of the primary supercomputer system located in Maryland in case of a system or communication outage. The primary system receives and processes the extensive amounts of environmental data acquired by modernized observing systems and runs highly sophisticated numerical weather prediction models. The system does its part to promote public safety and the protection of property by providing the NCEP with the computer systems that are capable of producing more accurate numerical weather prediction guidance for hurricanes, severe thunderstorms, floods and winter storms.
Another thing I have become aware of is that there is a much bigger organization behind the NWS than I had ever imagined. That organization is called the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA.
NOAA is recognized as a world leader in understanding and predicting the earth’s environment through advanced modeling capabilities, climate research and real-time weather products that have a wide-reaching influence on our nation’s economic, social and environmental needs.
NOAA has been a great asset for the I-79 Technology Park. Moreover, I believe that a recent decision by NOAA to substantially expand its presence in the park will have an important economic impact. This expansion has two parts. First, NOAA selected the I-79 Technology Park as the home of its newest supercomputer, expected to come online in late 2011. Second, NOAA selected the I-79 Technology Park as the location of its new weather satellite command center. Fairmont was chosen for two reasons: NOAA was already familiar with Fairmont thanks to the NWS effort at the NASA IV&V Facility and the I-79 Technology Park had an existing facility in its Research Center that more than met the requirements for both efforts.
NOAA began its selection process for the supercomputer in 2009, and after almost a year of reviews and evaluations, Fairmont was chosen. The motivation for the acquisition of more computing power came from ever-growing concerns over global climate change, hurricanes, wildfires and other environmental threats that have spurred more public demand for climate and weather information with increased accuracy, shorter lead times and local detail in model simulations.
To meet this demand, NOAA scientists require leadership-class, high performance computing (HPC) systems with petaflops-scale capabilities (a petaflop is one million-billion operations per second). Currently, there are only three systems in the world that have reached that level. The new one in Fairmont could actually be the most powerful in the world when it goes on-line next year.
In order to accommodate this new large-scale supercomputing approach to environmental modeling, NOAA determined that it required a new, more flexible facility for its HPC program. The facility NOAA wanted would have to be capable of supporting the vast array of technical and product delivery requirements to meet the needs of millions of diverse stakeholders, including NOAA scientists, academic researchers, private sector planners, Federal Government partners, policy makers, intergovernmental systems and ultimately the general public, particularly when life and property are threatened.
The new NOAA Environmental Security Computing Center (NESCC), as it will be called, will be expected to accommodate NOAA’s multiple mission requirements for HPC capabilities.
The new NESCC facility will need to support at least two supercomputing systems including NOAA’s planned development supercomputer for Climate Services and the Operations Backup supercomputer system for daily weather forecast production. The new HPC system will support NOAA’s environmental modeling program and will play a key role in modeling weather patterns.
The High Technology Foundation submitted a proposal to NOAA in 2009 that offered the use of the I-79 Technology Park’s Research Center as the home of the new NESCC operation. The Research Center’s many advanced features provided a perfect fit for the supercomputing environment of the NESCC. In July 2010, NOAA officially selected the Research Center as the new home for the NESCC.
In a separate but related effort, NOAA issued a request for proposals in 2009 for a new location that would house its Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) system. Again, the High Technology Foundation proposed the I-79 Technology Park Research Center as a possible location for the program. In the spring of 2010, NOAA chose the I-79 Technology Park as the new location.
NOAA operates a system of GOES to provide continuous weather imagery and monitoring of meteorological and space environment data to protect life and property across the United States. Two GOES satellites remain operational at all times, providing coverage for the eastern United States and most of the Atlantic Ocean, the western United States and the Pacific Ocean Basin. GOES satellites provide critical atmospheric, oceanic, climatic and solar and space weather products supporting weather forecasting and warnings, climatologic analysis and prediction, ecosystems management and safe and efficient commercial and private air and marine transportation. The GOES satellites also provide a platform for solar and space environmental observations. Auxiliary communications services are provided for GOES data rebroadcast, data collection platform relay, low-resolution imagery, emergency weather communications and satellite-aided search and rescue.
The presence of these two incredibly important activities at the I-79 Technology Park will have a significant impact. Already, many companies who support supercomputing operations, satellite operations and data analysis have entered into discussions with the High Technology Foundation to set up offices. In addition, NOAA has expressed a strong interest in establishing research efforts with both West Virginia University and Fairmont State University in the areas of meteorology and space weather prediction.
So, the next time you are watching The Weather Channel or checking the five-day forecast, remember that it was made possible in part by the operations in Fairmont, West Virginia.
