Global Lambda Integrated Facility

NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis Project at NOAA

SPIDR

Websites

http://www.ncep.noaa.gov/
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/wesley/reanalysis.html

Collaborators

Russia:Russian Academy of Sciences; Space Research Institute; Center of Geophysical Data Studies (collectively part of the Russian Data Intensive Group - RDIG)
United States: National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA; National Geophysics Data Center (NGDC); National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP); National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAP)

Description

NOAA works with the NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis Project, a joint project of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), to produce new atmospheric analyses using historical data (1948 onwards) and to produce analyses of current atmospheric state (Climate Data Assimilation System, CDAS).

Until recently, the meteorological community had to use analyses that supported real-time weather forecasting. These analyses are very non-homogeneous in time, as there have been big improvements in data assimilation systems. This played havoc with climate monitoring, as these improvements often produced changes in the apparent “climate.” Even fundamental quantities, such as the strength of the Hadley cell, have changed over the years as a result of the changes in the data assimilation systems.

A 1 Gbps VLAN from NOAA to StarLight (via National LambdaRail), from StarLight to NetherLight (via TransLight/StarLight-GLORIAD), and from NetherLight to MoscowLight and Russia’s Space Research Institute (via RBnet) was configured on August 1, 2007 for NCEP collaboration. The goal is to develop new data-mining algorithms to search for weather events inside Terabyte-sized databases, and then create new environmental databases.