Course Overview
Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) is part of our daily life. If you check a weather forecast from common sources, most of them are given by NWP as the main contributing component, together with data assimilation, post-processing and usually with the human forecaster’s interpretation and finalization of prediction messages. At present, physically-based NWP remains the major weather forecasting method.
In this course, we will go over some important glimpses of the theories and methodology behind NWP. You may have noticed from the course title that you are going to learn NWP with CPAS. CPAS stands for the ClusterTech Platform for Atmospheric Simulation, with the website https://cpas.earth/. It is an online high-performance computing platform capable of running NWP right for any registered user. It provides a free tier that allows learners to learn all the course content by hands-on inspecting and analyzing shared course data, as well as running NWP up to a computational resource limit. By Doing-It-Yourself, you learn not only theories but also get familiarized with practical NWP operations.
Every insider in the NWP community knows plotting NWP results, or visualizing the data with more modern tools, and analyzing them, especially against observational data are essential parts of daily work. The second half of this course teaches practical skills in NWP data visualization and analysis, using the Python programming language and related tools.
The last week of the course requires you to round up what you learned by running simulations of seasonal global circulations on the CPAS platform and write up your analysis results to be graded by a peer. You can expect this to be a great experience - Before the CPAS platform was made online in 2019, only specialists have access to supported NWP systems, or very delicate students or hobbyists bite the bullet of setting up a (high-performance) computer, compile open-source NWP software from scratch and setup the data analysis tools to play with. The CPAS platform hopefully enables you to enjoy your learning.
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