Anthony Paul Praino

Transparent grid enablement of weather research and forecasting

The impact of hurricanes is so devastating throughout different levels of society that there is a pressing need to provide a range of users with accurate and timely information that can enable effective planning for and response to potential hurricane landfalls. The Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) code is the latest numerical model that has been adopted by meteorological services worldwide. The current version of WRF has not been designed to scale out of a single organizations local computing resources. However, the high resource requirements of WRF for fine-resolution and ensemble forecasting demand a large number of computing nodes, which typically cannot be found within one organization. Therefore, there is a pressing need for the Grid-enablement of the WRF code such that it can utilize resources available in partner organizations. In this paper, we present our research on Grid enablement of WRF by leveraging our work in transparent shaping, GRID superscalar, profiling, code inspection, code modeling, meta-scheduling, and job flow management.

Enabling high-resolution forecasting of severe weather and flooding events in Rio de Janeiro

Safe operation of many cities is affected by relative extremes in weather conditions. With precipitation events, local topography and weather influence water runoff and infiltration, which directly affect flooding. Hence, the availability of highly focused predictions has the potential to mitigate the impact of severe weather on a city. Often, such information is simply unavailable. The initial step to address this gap is the application of state-of-the-art weather models at an urban scale calibrated to address this mismatch. The generation of operational forecasts at such a scale for the Rio de Janeiro metropolitan area suggests a horizontal resolution of approximately 1 km and a vertical resolution in the lower boundary layer of tens of meters. Forecasting impacts from storm-driven flooding events requires the development of a coupled hydrological model that operates at a street scale with resolution of approximately 1 m, capturing local terrain effects and simulating surface flow and water accumulation, especially for overland flow and ponding depth. This coupled approach has enabled operational prediction of storm impacts on local infrastructure, as well as measurement of the model error associated with such forecasts.

Enabling coupled models to predict the business impact of weather on electric utilities

Efficient, resilient, and safe operation of an electric utility is dependent on the local weather conditions at the scale of its infrastructure. This sensitivity to weather includes such factors as damage to distribution or transmission systems due to relative extremes in precipitation or wind, determining electricity demand and load, and power generation from renewable facilities. Hence, the availability of highly focused weather predictions has the potential to enable proactive planning for the effect of weather on utility systems. Often, such information is simply unavailable. The initial step to address this gap is the application of state-of-the-art physical weather models at the spatial scale of the utilitys infrastructure, calibrated to avoid this mismatch in predictability. The results of such a model are then coupled to a data-driven stochastic model to represent the weather impacts. The deployment of such methods requires an abstraction of the weather forecasting component to drive the model coupling.

Improving ferrite MIG head read‐back distortions caused by domain walls and granularity (abstract)

Ferrite MiG heads intended for narrow track (≲10 μm) digital recording were recently investigated in the critical pole‐tip region at the air‐bearing‐surface using micro‐ellipsometry, Kerr microscopy, and electron back‐scatter diffraction from individual grains,1 and using magnetic force microscopy to detect air‐gap remanent fields.2 Comparison of these direct observations with readback‐after‐write waveforms from written test tracks, and consideration of granularity influences on bulk permeability and domain size, indicate that waveform instability and asymmetry from polycrystalline ferrite (PCF) heads would be diminished by suitable size and orientation of the grains.1 The use of single‐crystal ferrite3 (SCF) for advanced laser enhanced etch definition3 of narrow pole MiGs can avoid this type of distortion. However, secondary signals4 often appear as weak pulses separated in time from the main gap pulse. We have associated this effect with a zig‐zag shaped wall seen nucleated and propagated from the pole ...