Hello, A yearly allocation for the LCRC cluster has been requested with the following updated information: Submitter/PI: Rao Kotamarthi Project Name: WRF-CHEM-GVAX Division: EVS Project title: Weather and Aerosol forecast products for the Ganges Valley Aerosol Project Associated funding: DOE-BER Other Systems: NERSC Science: The Ganges valley region is one of the largest and most rapidly developing sections of the Indian subcontinent. Impacts of changes in precipitation patterns, temperature, and the flow of the snow-fed rivers could be immense. Recent satellite-based measurements have indicated that the upper Ganges valley has some of the highest persistently observed aerosol optical depth values. The aerosol layer covers a vast region, extending across the Indo-Gangetic Plain to the Bay of Bengal during the winter and early spring of each year. This is one of the few regions showing a trend toward increasing surface dimming and enhanced mid-tropospheric warming. The consequences of aerosols and associated pollution for surface insolation over the Ganges valley and monsoons in particular are not well understood. Our proposed field study will provide critical data to address these hypotheses and will contribute to developing better parameterizations for tropical clouds, convection, an d aerosol-cloud interactions. The primary science questions for the mission are as follows: (a) What are the sources and sinks of the aerosols comprising the aerosol cloud over this region and what effects does it have on clear-sky radiation fields, as well as on cloud micro- and macrophysical properties? What effect does the diurnal PBL cycle in the Ganges valley have on the atmospheric distribution of aerosols? (b) What effect do increasing aerosols in the Ganges Valley have on the ISM? What effect do aerosols have on shortwave radiative forcing, mid-tropospheric heating and convective activity over continental India? To achieve these science objectives an implementation has been devised in collaboration with scientists in India. The primary anchor facility for the project is the ARM mobile facility. A deployment starting in approximately June 2011 and lasting to April 2012 at the ARIES observatory located in Nainital is anticipated for AMF ground operations. During this one-year deployment of the AMF there will be an intensive periods, extending from February 1st, 2012 to April 1st 2012 (winter intensive). Project description: The Ganges Valley Aerosol eXperiment (GVAX), led by Dr. Rao Kotamarthi, will begin its one-year ground-based observation with the Atmospheric Radiation Monitoring (ARM) mobile facility at Nainital, India,starting June, 2011. This major field study involving multiple Department of Energy laboratories will focus on investigating the potential impact of aerosols on regional scale radiative forcing changes over the Ganges Valley. Measurements of radiative flux, cloud, convection, and aerosol physical, chemical, and optical properties will be made to develop core data sets for scientific analysis. The measurements will range from those made at surface locations that yield point and profile data sets to a few selected aircraft platform-based measurements. However, these measurements and the subsequent data sets must be placed in a larger regional context in order to relate the data to a particular dynamic state of the atmosphere and begin developing hypothe ses that explain observed phenomena. The regional context will be developed within the conditions generated by a 3-D regional scale climate model. Baseline simulations of 3-D regional scale model will provide the necessary analytical support for many of the scientific studies done under GVAX. In addition, the 3-D model will be a test bed for high performance computing data storage and visualization. We have implemented and run the latest 3.3 beta version of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model with an online capability of simulating chemistry and aerosols (WRF-Chem) on the Argonne Fusion clusters. The WRF-Chem model has been optimized and uses domain decomposition to divide total work load on the distributed-memory systems. Without chemistry and aerosol modules, the standard WRF CONUS benchmark (48 hr and 12 km forecast over Continental US) completes in 15 minutes on a teraflop system (~250 processors). For the GVAX campaign, the principal investigator will simulate a model domain from 55E to 95E and 0 to 36N, divided into 367x331 12-km grid cells with 28 vertical layers from the surface to the top of the atmosphere. The model boundary conditions will be updated on a daily basis from the gridded NOAA/NCEP global forecasts, which are available online within about 36 hrs to 48 hrs after real time. Therefore, there is a need to perform at least 72 hr model simulations in order to provide 36 hr forecasts required for the field experiment. The test runs on the WRF-Chem model have been completed on a number of nodes. The regional model scales up to 250 cores and needs ~10 hours to complete a 72-hr forecast. The speedup achieved with 72 cores is about 13 relative to 4 cores. Memory used on each node decreases from 4.5 GB, 1.5GB, 1.1 GB, to 0.9 GB while the number of nodes increases from 4, 16, 36, to 72 cores. The ideal computing time to finish daily forecasts is around 3~5 hours. Thus, the daily forecasts is expected to require about 200-250 cores. Because of gas-phase and aerosol chemistry for pollutant forecast output, the WRF-Chem is much more expensive in computation time compared to running the WRF model only. However, forecasts of the geographic distribution and transport pattern of atmospheric gases and aerosols are required for the GVAX campaign. The above estimated time does not include pre-processing of the GFS meteorology fields, post-processing and visualization of the forecast results. In addition t o the model runs, these processes will be done in serial and cost an additional several hours on Fusion. We have setup a Live Access Server (LAS) node at Argonne to serve the model results to the user community. The site (atmos.anl.gov:8080/las) is now operational and we plan to regularly update the website with model results on a daily basis 3-D regional scale model simulations will provide the necessary analytical support for many of the scientific studies done under GVAX. These modeling results of air pollution and meteorological fields will become one of the central ‘data’ products for the experiments archived at the ARM websites. The expectation is that there will be a significant number of scientists from around the world who will be interested in GVAX data. In addition, the 3-D model will be a test bed for high performance computing data storage and visualization. The large volumes of model outputs generated would be used to test or assess the feasibility of using the cloud computing systems (such as Magellan) to perform/extract a pre-determined set of forecast products as and when needed by scientists distributed at disparate locations world-wide. Project URL: http://www.arm.gov/sites/amf/pgh/ Current FY Hours Used: undetermined amount New FY Requested allocation: 450000 Q1: 150000 Q2: 150000 Q3: 100000 Q4: 50000 Justification: Thank You, The LCRC Accounts System