Hurricane Modeling in Public Cloud

The Hurricane Analysis and Forecast System (HAFS) Ensemble in Real-time on the Cloud (HERC) experiment of 2024 is a highly successful real-time demonstration of the feasibility of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Weather Service (NWS) running a state-of-the-science hurricane modeling system on the cloud. For the second year in the row, the HERC experiment, supported by the Hurricane Forecast Improvement Program (HFIP) and Microsoft, advanced the state of ensemble science and development at the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Environmental Modeling Center (EMC). This was realized through close collaboration with Microsoft, real-time Azure cloud allocation provided by the NOAA Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) High Performance Computing & Communications (HPCC), and a team of scientific contributors. HERC ran during the hurricane season of 2024, coinciding with peak activity and the latter half of the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season. HERC was run on Azure using the Parallel Works middleware platform on latest HPC chipsets and parallel storage capabilities powered by Microsoft and AMD. Running a coupled 31-member ensemble of NOAA’s novel HAFSv2 model, at 4km resolution (operational resolution), real-time probabilistic forecasts for Atlantic tropical cyclones were produced 2x per day.