Next Generation Weather & Climate Prediction

Workshop: call for participants

Closing date: 16:00 on 20 May 2010

Date of workshop: 17 June 2010
Venue: The Met Office, Exeter

Introduction

The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) invites applications to attend a one day workshop for researchers to develop activities addressing one of the goals of the Next Generation Weather & Climate Prediction Systems programme (see goal a of Action 2 pages 11-13 of the Climate System Theme Action Plan 2009 below).

Climate System Theme Action Plan 2009.

This is a new programme and NERC is making a £2·2M investment over 5 years to deliver this goal.

The Met Office will be making a comparable contribution of their resources 'in kind' and the Science and Technology Facilities Council's (STFC) Hartree Centre also plan to collaborate in the programme.

This programme will contribute to delivering the strategic goals of contributing to UK leadership in predicting the regional and local impacts of environmental change from days to decades.

Approach

The initial phase of the programme will be commissioned in two calls:

This first call invites individuals to a workshop which will help to determine the best way to develop a consortium or working group that will deliver the programme's goals.
A future second call will invite individuals to be a part of that consortium. The consortium will comprise small teams of scientists from the NERC community, the Met Office and the STFC Hartree Centre who will work together over a period of 5 years.

Workshop attendees are permitted to apply to be part of the consortium. Attendance at the workshop is not a prerequisite for applying to be part of the consortium, nor a guarantee of acceptance.

Background

Technical developments in computing and in global scale observations create an environment of enormous opportunity for improving capabilities for weather and climate prediction, but there are major scientific and technical barriers to realizing this potential.

One issue requiring urgent attention is the selection of numerical algorithms currently used to simulate the atmosphere in climate prediction models.

Many of these algorithms are unable to take advantage of the additional processing power of massively parallel computers moving towards petascale and exascale resources.

The development of new algorithms involves research challenges in numerical and computational methods.

It is proposed that a consortium is created, between NERC, STFC and the Met Office to research, design, and develop a new atmospheric dynamical core for a next-generation weather and climate prediction system, to eventually replace the dynamical core of the Unified Model (UM), the principal UK tool for weather and climate prediction.

The UM achieves high efficiency on parallel computers with up to around 1000 processors, but aspects of the current numerical design restrict further parallelization, in particular:

the latitude-longitude grid, and the associated poles, on which the equations are solved;
the implicit techniques requiring global communication; and
the semi-Lagrangian advection scheme requiring non-local data access.

To develop a new dynamical core suitable for massively parallel computers requires a mixture of basic research in numerical methods and computational science, and testing and development work. Research is required to:

determine which combination of (i)-(iii) (possibly all three) is the primary bottleneck to effective massive parallelization, and whether it is the schemes themselves or the algorithmic implementation of them;
identify a limited number of alternative numerical schemes, together with an analysis of their relative advantages and disadvantages;
develop efficient implementations for those schemes on current and near-future many-core and attached processor architectures; and
develop a working, tested dynamical core using a chosen scheme.

The principal result will be a tested, highly parallelizable dynamical core suitable for operational use within a unified weather and climate prediction model.

The viability of the dynamical core will be demonstrated through a substantial integration on a system that is as close as possible in architecture to systems expected to be available on the 5-10 year time horizon (procurement of such a system is included in the Hartree Centre's strategic plan).

Workshop details

Format

The workshop will run over one day.

Our aim will be to outline in more detail the aims and objectives of the consortium and to allow potential applicants to discuss possible ideas and approaches with NERC, the Met Office and STFC.

The agenda of the workshop will include:

Introductions
Aims and purpose of the action
State of play of the Unified Model
Outline the scope of the action and the proposed programme
Technology developments – a forward look
Discussions on specific issues and proposed approaches
The best approach to build the consortium.

Location and date

This workshop will take place at the Met Office, Exeter, on 17 June 2010.

An application will be taken to mean availability for this date, and a definite commitment to attend. Full details of the venue, agenda etc. will be provided to all participants.

NERC will cover costs for travel, and hotel costs if these are required to attend the workshop.

Application procedure

Who should apply?

The workshop will ideally include representatives from the research community with expertise in this area who are interested in either joining or being part of the consortium contributing to the redevelopment of the dynamical core of the UM.

It has not yet been decided what the balance will be within the consortium of researchers working full-time and those who will contribute their expertise on a part-time basis.

This will be one of the issues to be discussed at the workshop.

We encourage applications from all relevant research areas.

We are not defining the disciplines that should be represented at this workshop; rather we are asking potential participants to indicate how their expertise can address the defined problem.

This workshop will be an opportunity to share ideas and develop collaborations that address the stated research questions.

How to apply?

We invite applications from individual academic researchers. An applicant cannot ask someone else in their research group to take up their place at the workshop. A panel will identify up to 30 participants to take part in the workshop, via the assessment procedure outlined below.

Application form

Applicants should complete this two-page application form and submit it together with a CV.

The answers to these questions will be used to select the participants at the workshop. Please note that we are looking for both your relevant skills and expertise and for evidence of how you might approach the problem that the research question raises.

Applicants must be available to attend for the full duration of the workshop.

If you are selected as a participant, your details will be made available to other participants to facilitate networking at the event.

Timetable

Completed application forms should be submitted by 16:00 on 20 May 2010. Applications before this date are very welcome. No further documentation will be accepted.

We plan to inform applicants by 28 May 2010 of the outcome of the selection process for the workshop.

Assessment criteria

Applications will be considered by a joint NERC, Met Office and STFC panel. The final decision on the selection of delegates lies with this panel.

Overall, the selection panel will seek to ensure that a balance of expertise is present at the workshop; their assessment will be based on the following criteria:

specific expertise relevant to the topic of the workshop;
the ability to develop new and highly original research ideas;
the potential to contribute to the redevelopment of the dynamical core;
the ability to work in a team with members from a number of different disciplines.

Please ensure you fully complete the application form, as this is the information, together with your CV, on which potential workshop attendees will be selected.

User questionnaire

As part of the work to define the priorities for the programme we are also interested in gathering the requirements of the UM users' community for future developments of the UM's dynamical core.

Please note that at this stage we are interested only in the requirements rather than any proposed solutions.

We are looking here only for requirements for the physical and numerical properties of the dynamical core, not for software engineering issues.

We are looking at development of a dynamical core that will become part of the UM in 5-10 years time, and will be designed for scalable running on massively parallel computer systems. Please therefore consider your long term requirements rather than immediate issues.

Questionnaire

Next Generation Modelling for Weather & Climate: User requirements questionnaire.

Completed questionnaires should be submitted by 16:00 on 29 October 2010.

Submission and contact details

If you wish to attend the workshop please submit the:

Two page workshop application form; and
an up-to-date CV.

To Mrs Nicky Lewis no later than 16:00 on 20 May 2010. Please note that we are unable to accept late submissions.

The User Requirements questionnaire should be submitted to Mrs Nicky Lewis by 16:00 on 29 October 2010.

For further information on the application process or other questions about the call please contact:

Nicola Lewis
Tel: 01793 411739

For information relating to technical requirements of the project and the aspects of the User questionnaire please contact:

Terry Davies
Met Office contact

About the programme

External links

Met Office