The Rapid Refresh Forecast System (RRFS) is NOAA’s next generation convection-allowing ensemble and is currently planned for implementation in the last quarter of 2023. The planned configuration for RRFS is ambitious and its development requires substantial computational resources. The system will cover North America at 3 km grid-spacing with 65 vertical layers having 36 members deployed for its data assimilation system and a subset of 9 members for the free forecast. The RRFS will be hourly-updating and feature forecasts out to 18 hours every hour with extensions to 60 hours 4 times per day. To develop such a system requires computational resources beyond those available on currently deployed on-prem systems.
Cloud-based high performance computing (HPC) capabilities have grown over the past several years and it is apparent that cloud HPC has a role in research and development of our numerical weather prediction systems, and perhaps in operations. In this talk we will describe our recent and ongoing work in developing and testing, in real-time at NOAA testbeds, a prototype RRFS ensemble forecast system using cloud infrastructure.
