The CAnadian Surface Prediction ARchive (CaSPAr): A Platform to Enhance Environmental Modelling in Canada and Globally
Abstract
Environmental models are tools for the modern society for a wide range of applications such as flood and drought monitoring, carbon storage and release estimates, predictions of power generation amounts, or reservoir management amongst others. Environmental models differ in the types of processes they incorporate, where land surface models focus on the energy, water, and carbon cycle of the land and hydrological models concentrate mainly on the water cycle. All these models, however, have in common that they rely on environmental input data from ground observations such as temperature, precipitation and/or radiation to force the model. If the same model is run in forecast mode, numerical weather predictions (NWPs) are needed to replace these ground observations. Therefore, it is critical that NWP data be available to develop models and validate forecast performance. These data are provided by the Meteorological Service of Canada (MSC) on a daily basis. MSC provides multiple products ranging from large scale global models ( 33km/grid cell) to high resolution pan-Canadian models ( 2.5km/grid cell). Operational products providing forecasts in real-time are made publicly available only at the time of issue through various means with new forecasts issued 2-4 times per day. Unfortunately, long term storage of these data are offline and relatively inaccessible to the research and operational communities. The new Canadian Surface Prediction Archive (CaSPAr) platform is an accessible rolling archive of 10 of MSC's NWP products. The 500TB platform will allow users to extract specific time periods, regions of interest and variables of interest in an easy to access NetCDF format. CaSPAr and community contributed post-processing scripts and tools are being developed such that the users, for example, can interpolate the data due to their needs or auto-generate model forcing files. We will present the CaSPAr platform and provide some insights in the current development of the web-based user interface (frontend) and implementations used to retrieve MSC's data and provide the data to the user in the inquired shape (backend).
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2017
- Bibcode:
- 2017AGUFM.H13O..06T
- Keywords:
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- 1820 Floodplain dynamics;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 1821 Floods;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 1847 Modeling;
- HYDROLOGY;
- 4331 Disaster relief;
- NATURAL HAZARDS