Exploiting the Internet to Automate the Execution of Mesoscale Models

Meteorologists at the US Army Research Laboratory at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, are currently involved in researching nearly a dozen mesoscale models. Various researchers have written the conversion programs for reformatting and analyzing data on an as-needed basis, in stand-alone fashion. In many cases, the output of one model serves as input to another and rarely does the output format of one model match the input format of another. In isolation, these models provide excellent solutions to the problems for which they were designed to solve. However, a major drawback in the use of these models is that new users may spend an inordinate amount of time learning the procedures for model execution. Furthermore, the procedures themselves are manual and repetitive, and could profit by computer automation.

In this paper, we address the problems of using mesoscale models by exploiting the internet to provide a common interface for all users of the models. We describe the design of a web-based system that uses the common gateway interface, CGI, together with perl scripting, to automate most of the repetitive tasks that were formerly accomplished manually. We describe our prototype application that automates the processing of Navy Operational Global Atmospheric Prediction System (NOGAPS) data into a Battlescale Forecast Model (BFM) readable format. Users of our web page need only supply parameters to an HTML form and then submit the form through CGI to our Perl script for computation of the BFM large-scale initialization data files. We have reduced the BFM preprocessing of NOGAPS data from over one hour to 2 ½ minutes.