Exposing Undergraduate Students to Numerical Weather Prediction through the Use of Software Containers and Cloud Computing

Undergraduate exposure to Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) varies significantly within each university program for a number of reasons, including the fact that NWP is resource- and knowledge-intensive. In particular, for smaller meteorology programs limitations may be due to fewer course offerings, lack of expertise in NWP among the teaching staff, and insufficient computational resources. However, NWP is a critical component to educating our future workforce in meteorology. A major hurdle for exercising NWP systems in a classroom environment is that the software components require significant computing resources to operate and many of its users have to spend large amounts of time configuring, compiling, and optimizing the code and libraries on a particular computer platform. For students, especially those without comprehensive knowledge of, or even limited exposure to, these types of computing resources, the concept of NWP can be daunting and discouraging. In recent years, the concept of using software "containers" has been gaining momentum in the NWP community. The container technology allows for the complete software system to be bundled (operating system, libraries, code, etc.) and shipped to users in order to reduce spin-up time, leading to a more efficient setup process. For the education communities, university faculty will find software containers to be a useful teaching tool to add to their course curriculum to expose undergraduate and graduate students to practical applications of NWP. Through exposure to emerging scientific tools such as containers that promote quick spin-up of running NWP software components, students will gain valuable knowledge and an interest may be sparked to further explore the topic of NWP in the future. This presentation will discuss opportunities provided for undergraduate students in the Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (EAS) Department at Metropolitan State University of Denver (MSU Denver) through collaboration with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Research Applications Laboratory (RAL) to learn more about end-to-end NWP systems through the use of software containers running in the cloud. Personal experience during this project will be described to elaborate on how software containers can be an innovative teaching tool that will help university faculty integrate NWP into their course curriculum. Hands-on learning examples for students to gain practical experience with using established software containers to efficiently set up and run a complete NWP system will be discussed. Ultimately, this teaching toolkit will also promote deeper learning through early exposure to NWP curriculum and running software on a cloud platform. The impact of this effort will be realized in the short-term as it will readily assist with enhancing students education in the classroom prior to graduation and more thoroughly prepare them for a number of positions in NWP in the future. Going forward, there is a desire to use this experience as a stepping stone for engaging other educators and programs in the future.