TACC Ranger Super Helps Upgrade Hurricane Forecasts

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Researchers are using the TACC Ranger supercomputer to develop and test a new, high-resolution hurricane forecasting system that incorporates Doppler radar data from planes flying into the storm.

We use statistical information about the background and merge it with the observations,” said Fuqing Zhang, professor of meteorology at the Pennsylvania State University. “By combining the forecast and the observations in a new optimal way, we greatly improved the model initial fields over the existing methods used by the NOAA operational hurricane models.”

Using Ranger, Zhang’s system forecasted the track and intensity of every major storm in the Atlantic throughout the 2011 hurricane season, sharing the results of his simulations on his personal research website.

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