Clouds in the Cloud: Weather Forecasts and Applications within Cloud Computing Environments

Abstract

loud computing offers new opportunities to the scientific community through cloud-deployed software, data-sharing and collaboration tools, and the use of cloud-based computing infrastructure to support data processing and model simulations. This article provides a review of cloud terminology of possible interest to the meteorological community, and focuses specifically on the use of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) concepts to provide a platform for regional numerical weather prediction. Special emphasis is given to developing countries that may have limited access to traditional supercomputing facilities. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) resources were used in an IaaS capacity to provide regional weather simulations with costs ranging from $40 to $75 per 48-h forecast, depending upon the configuration. Simulations provided a reasonable depiction of sensible weather elements and precipitation when compared against typical validation data available over Central America and the Caribbean.