The TIGGE data management challenges take many forms; data volume – 88 TB per year received over the Internet in the form of 1.6 million global fields per day, and diversity in number of ensemble members, mixture of parameters from each provider, forecast length and initialization times, and critically, non-uniform horizontal gridding across the providers. NCAR has developed a system that dynamically handles the constant flow of data and offers users an interface where they can select data providers, common model output parameters, vertical pressure levels, temporal and spatial domains, grid interpolation to uniform latitude by longitude space, and output in either GRIB2 or netCDF. Although this system is a focus for TIGGE data access (http://tigge.ucar.edu) at NCAR it is also more broadly supported by a web-based users forum for online discussions, direct access to archive files, a suite of software to aid research analyses, links to the two other TIGGE Archives (China Meteorological Administration (CMA), and European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF)), systematic long-term archiving enabling analysis on supercomputers at NCAR, and an XML format based ensemble tropical cyclone track archive derived from the forecasts.
The data providers are ECMWF, UK Met Office, Japanese Meteorological Agency, Korea Meteorological Administration, MeteoFrance, Australia Bureau of Meteorology (BOM), Meteorological Service of Canada, Centro de Previsao Tempo e Estudos Climaticos Brazil, National Centers for Environmental Prediction, and CMA.
This presentation will highlight the TIGGE Archive content, describe the functions and solutions to the challenges of developing and operating this system with a small support staff, and introduce potential future improvements.
Acknowledgements of significant support,
- Several staff at Unidata, UCAR/UOP
- Raoult, B. and Fuentes, M., ECMWF
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