Detection and Diagnosis of Tropical Storms in High-Resolution Atmospheric Models

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)/Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) has built a software called TSTORMS code. TSTORMS identifies storms in climate model data. This software uses known physical features associated with tropical storms i.e.,vorticity, vertical temperature, and moisture structure. These physical features are used to detect storms and categorize them by strength. As the models grow in resolution, this analysis software has also grown in computational expense and complexity. Scientists at Lawrence Berkeley Labs (LBL) have created a version of the TSTORMS code called: A Parallel Toolkit for Extreme Climate Analysis (TECA). For this project, a comparison of the computational cost of running the TECA code and the TSTORMS code was done. The comparison was performed for a 15 year simulation (1981-1995) using the GFDL atmospheric data. The TSTORMS code runs serial in a single core and finished the job in 3 hours for a 15 year simulation. On the contrary, the TECA code runs parallel with 15 cores and finished in 24 hours. After finishing the comparison it can be conclude that the TSTORMS code is more efficient in terms of time and computational cost. As a result of this diagnosis, a new and faster version of the TSTORMS code was developed. This new version of the TSTORMS code is a storm diagnosis installed at the GFDL automated analysis suit.