WRFPortal: a Web-based Portal for the WRF model

NOAA's Forecast Systems Laboratory has begun development on WRF-Portal, a web-based portal designed to connect users with distributed resources necessary to run the WRF model and related pre and post processing routines. WRF-Portal is a Java Webstart GUI application that allows users to create model domains, configure model runs, run the models on local or remote systems, monitor the tasks while they are running, and inform users when they have completed. WRF-Portal incorporates the WRF-SI GUI Tool that allows users to graphically select or define their domains. Support for both the WRF-ARW and WRF-NMM is provided.

WRF-Portal is being developed in collaboration with researchers at the NOAA, NCAR, and the DTC to handle the configuration and running of tens to hundreds of model runs in support of their model development activities and to perform the evaluation of existing or proposed observing systems using OSSEs and data denial experiments. WRF-Portal runs on all platforms and can be accessed from a web page. It also includes a server side job manager program that manages and executes the jobs created by the portal. It is designed to understand and handle dependencies between tasks, re-submit tasks that fail, and inform users when problems occur.

This poster will describe the current capabilities of WRF-Portal, and illustrate where future development is planned to incorporate web and grid services, distributed data management, improved task management capabilities, and proposed extensions to the portal in order to support other weather and climate models. We are also collaborating with the Linked Environments for Atmospheric Discovery (LEAD) project to incorporate grid capabilities into WRF-Portal as they become available.