Advanced Climate Modeling and Environmental Simulations (ACMES): Bringing DoD Climatological Support into the 21st Century

.The Air Force Combat Climatology Center (AFCCC), in conjunction with MESO, Inc. and St. Louis University, has developed a technique to generate climatological statistics using a high-resolution numerical model. This last year in the contract has seen this program move from a research and development effort into a full-scale production environment. This presentation describes how AFCCC is implementing the modeling technique for operational support of its customers. ACMES is designed to support two types of demands: (1) the climatologist who needs descriptive climatological statistics and (2) the simulator who wants a 3-dimensional representative environment to feed computerized war gaming simulations. The former, called Routine ACMES, is the process of executing the model for a long period of time in a data assimilation mode to generate a “historical” data set of 3-D grids that can be summarized into descriptive statistics. The latter, called Just-in-Time ACMES, is the process of generating hourly numerical model output for a specific, brief period of time for a specific location to fulfill a specific purpose in computer simulations. In order to accomplish its mission, ACMES requires a tremendous amount of computer resources. A complete set of simulations for a ten-year period of record requires over 20,000 CPU hours and generates over half a terrabyte of hourly, modeled data and associated climatological statistics. AFCCC has built a non-traditional, cost-effective solution to modeling and simulation of the atmosphere with respect to climatological applications. Using a network of Intel-based computers, an array of mass-storage hard disk drives, and a creative simulation strategy ACMES is able to produce a ten-year modeled high-resolution climatology of a particular region in only 52 days. ACMES can generate climatological products for virtually any parameter that can be modeled using mathematical, physical, and statistical techniques. The model generates over 100 different descriptive statistics of 30 meteorological parameters resulting in a massive collection of climatological charts for use by AFCCC customers. These high-resolution products provide valuable additional information to the DoD community, especially in regions of sparse or non-existent weather data