Operational Weather Forecasting Using Commercial Cloud Computing

During the past few years interest has increased in the ability to use commercial computing clouds for Operational Weather Forecasting. Due to the composition of forecasting applications and operations, the High Performance Computing systems required to complete forecasts in a timely and accurate manner have remained mainly in the on-premise datacenter. This has continued to be a limitation for many researchers and system developers.

We aim to demonstrate the use of commercial clouds as practical and reliable alternatives to on-premise systems. Now that several commercial cloud providers offer resources that meet the hardware and software requirements, forecasters are no longer limited based on hardware availability.

Examples of using commercial clouds, multiple locations within a single commercial cloud, and multiple commercial clouds in various availability and resiliency configurations will be examined.