The LEAD Gateway II: A Hardened, Persistent Community Resource for Meteorological Research and Education

Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery (LEAD), a 5-year NSF Large Information Technology Research grant, created an integrated web service-oriented architecture to support mesoscale meteorological data acquisition, analysis, assimilation, simulation modeling, prediction, mining and visualization. A unique component of LEAD is the operation of meteorological resources, and associated cyberinfrastructure, as dynamically adaptive, on-demand systems that can a) change configuration rapidly and automatically in response to weather; b) respond to decision-driven inputs from users; c) initiate other processes automatically; d) steer remote observing technologies, such as Doppler radars, to optimize data collection for the problem at hand; and e) provide the fault tolerance necessary to achieve required levels of performance. LEAD has been used for several years in the NOAA Storm Prediction Center Hazardous Weather Test Bed, and now researchers from LEAD are applying its concepts to help develop the FAA's NextGen weather system.

LEAD is now moving beyond its research intensive phase and is collaborating with Microsoft Research, Inc. (MSR) to strengthen and harden its capabilities into a reliable, highly available platform on which users can execute on-demand, custom workflows that ingest data from real-time data sources such as NEXRAD radars, and carry out sophisticated weather related analysis and modeling tasks. The new architecture is being anchored around the MSR Trident scientific workflow system, Windows Workflow Foundation, and Windows HPC server. LEAD users will access the system either via Trident desktop clients or the Silverlight browser.

This paper describes the technological transition required between the web-based service-oriented architecture and the client-based MSR environment. It further discusses the research and educational opportunities to be made available by the new system, as well as the potential for operational utilization.