1. Consortium Meeting 10/6/2011

2. Major Side News: Langley Hill Radar

3. Langley Hill Radar Operational Fully operational INCLUDING dual-pol capability. Note: all of our regional radars will be dual-pol soon. Extraordinary view offshore and over the coastal zone Now seeing things 200-250 miles offshore. Will get dual-pol graphics online in next two weeks

8. Radar One major enhancement left on Nov 1: zero degree elevation angle (or close to it). Much more range and MUCH better low-level coverage. This year will will begin assimilating the Langley Radar (and others) into our regional data assimilation system.

9. Web Access Issues

10. Hits

11. Data

12. Web Server is Bogging Down The department web server is bogging down under an increased load. Has occasionally caused degradation in access times for WRF model products The Department is going to substantially upgrade the server and will pay for it (this is where the indirect costs go).

13. Personnel Issues Phil Regulski has left for the private sector ($$$ issues) a few weeks ago. Virtually no warning. Mark Albright has increased his hours to take over Phil’s tasks for model interface/graphics issues. Jeff Baars took over Seattle applications Dave Ovens has taken over baby sitting the real- time EnKF system. Short-handed now and will have to deal with that.

14. Items Completed Since Last Meeting The point and click, random selection capability, is operational for meteograms, soundings, and time- heights. Takes roughly 20 seconds to come up. Will add 1.3 km when it is stabilized

15. Major Upgrade This Summer Added three new nodes (24 processors) and expanded the 1.3 km half-way to Missoula

16. Major Upgrade 1 Big problems. There was an incompatibility in the infiniband cards on the new nodes with those on the old nodes. Had to return the motherboards and exchange for identical ones as the old machines with onboard infiniband. Big pain. Problem was eventually solved with new cards and new domain went operational during the summer (0630).

17. Improvements Dropped terrain smoothing when we found another way to insure stability of 4/3 km runs—sound wave averaging option. (Had been smoothing the most severe terrain where we had the problems). Added air quality page for 4/3 km resolution.

18. Striation Problem Fix Striations in precipitation were found in the SW part of the domain

19. Striation Problem Confirmed by the WRF folks. Turns out it originated in the new Kain-Fritsch convective scheme with shallow cumulus. Tested the old Kain-Fritsch and new Grell convective scheme…problem went away and everything else looked similar. Switch to old KF on August 30.

20. Major Upgrade (2) Ready for the push of the 4/3 km to Missoula. Also moving the 4/3 farther out into the Pacific to alleviate problems with the boundary being too close to the WA coast. Also increased the 12 and 4-km domains to allow this. Have added 4 new 12-core nodes. Total processors that we will run is 136 (11x8 + 4x12). Not long ago we were running 30-40 processors! The new units are working well and scaling—timing should be very similar to current smaller domain.

21. March 11

22. July 11

23. October 11 Major Lesson: Need to get upstream boundary away from our areas of interest

24. New 1.3 km domain

25. Land Mask

26. Land Use

27. Terrain

29. Some Examples

30. Major coastal improvements

32. Much Better Coverage for W. Entrance to the Strait

33. New RAID data server We are rapidly running out of space with new graphics and the HUGE new domain. Purchased a new data server and will install as soon as 4/3 km domain is stable next week. Also does graphics generation. Dual 6-core xeons with 48 gig of ram. We bought it with 12 2-TB drives running raid 6 for a total of 20TB usable space and dual-disk failure redundancy. It is expandable to 36 drives -> 34x2 or 68TB possible. It also has a spare raid card as a backup and infiniband. When this is up we will go forward with the graphics upgrades everyone wanted (some have been done though).

34. Next Steps OK to initiate expansion? WSU and others ready for changes in 12, 4, and 1.3 km domains? Next new RAID array. Next new dept web server. Next new graphics for 1.3 km and expansion of random selection to 1.3 km Addition of radar to EnKF.

35. Example other items SNOWWATCH close to being ready to go.

36. The END