LEAD II

Collect and visualize provenance data

About

LEAD II is a follow-on to the successful Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery NSF funded large-scale ITR. LEAD II carries the vision of LEAD forward into new areas as it explores research challenges in hybrid computing and in the manipulation and use of weather data in non-weather applications.

The LEAD II project utilizes the LDM system to ingest gigabytes of publicly-available weather data on a daily basis, for use in meteorological analysis, metadata collection, and workflow systems research.

The products ingested include NEXRAD Level 2, ADAS, Rapid Update Cycle (RUC), and North American Mesoscale (NAM) data. The NAM data has resolutions of 12KM and 40KM.

How it works

LEAD II will produce on-the-hour weather forecasts and create up to 600 weather images each day that will be delivered to mobile devices carried in the field by the VORTEX2 storm chasers.

Forecasting weather Beth Plale explains the need for and process of working with LEAD II

Archived data set

We ran short term (10-15hr) weather forecasts each day from May 1-June 15, 2010, in support of the NSF-funded Vortex2 tornado data gathering field effort.

Upon completion, we curated the collection, gathering together the discovery and use metadata about each of the forecast runs to store with the run. We bundled each forecast day as a WRF output file, a number of 2-D visualizations of various variables, and metadata for the WRF out and each 2D visualization.

License

This LEADII-Vortex2 data set is made available under the Open Database License. Any rights in individual contents of the database are licensed under the Database Contents License.

Additional resources

Microsoft DemoFest Poster (.pdf)
Research presented at the invite-only event in Redmond, WA, July 2010.

Slides of initial runs (.ppt)
USDA Project - Kathleen Baker, May 2010

LEAD II / Trident workflows for timely weather products: the challenge of Vortex2 Presentation
Presented by Professor Beth Plale, Microsoft External Research Symposium, April 2010

Project Contributors

Primary Investigators

  • Keith Brewster, University of Oklahoma
  • Craig Mattocks, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
  • Beth Plale, Indiana University

Other contributors

  • Ashish Bhangale
  • Kavitha Chandrasekar
  • Jeff Cox
  • Gamal El Afandi
  • Chathura Herath
  • Scott Jensen
  • Yuan Luo
  • Felix Terkhorn
  • Tejas Totade
  • Prashant Sabhnani
  • Yiming Sun
  • Eran Chinthaka Withana

Sponsors

Microsoft Research
2009-present

Data to Insight Center
Indiana University Pervasive Technology Institute
2009-present

Western Michigan University/United States Department of Agriculture
2010

National Science Foundation
Collaborative Research: ITR Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discover (LEAD), Towards Broad and Deep Community Deployment of LEAD Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery (LEAD)
2003-2009