A Weather Emergency 



Using a real-time weather forecast for the area 20 miles directly ahead, a trucker diverts to an alternate 

 route and reduces by hours the potential delay in delivering critically needed parts to a company that 

 uses a just-in-time inventory system. Relayed from a weather forecast center to the truck's on board 

 navigation system, this highly accurate forecast that pinpoints developing adverse weather conditions 

 is made possible by the use of new computer weather prediction models that exploit the capabilities of 

 high performance, massively parallel computing systems. 



Already, advances in computing and communications technologies have led to significant improve- 

 ments in weather forecasting. As illustrated in the recent case of Hurricane Andrew in Florida, this 

 improved forecasting can save lives as well as millions of dollars in evacuation costs through better 

 targeting of evacuation efforts. 



Services, standards, tools, and user interfaces are required to build and support systems for acquiring 

 large amounts of three-dimensional environmental data from different sources (e.g., in situ and remote 

 sensing observations). These systems must also support high resolution modeling using these data, 

 incorporating improved representations of the physical environment, and a real-time information dis- 

 semination capability to provide detailed forecast information for hundreds of different locations to 

 thousands of users. 



Unlike the first example, the user community for environmental information is larger and more 

 diverse. Weather forecasts are needed by the general public, and for aviation, ship navigation, and 

 agriculture, for example, while HPCC-funded researchers use much of the same observational data to 

 model global change. Starting with user interfaces tailored to different kinds of users, individual users 

 customize them for their own needs. The delivery and use of environmental information for this broad 

 range of applications is performed by a partnership of government and value added private sector 

 information companies, all part of the Nil. 



The IITA component will enable the development of an integrated infrastructure so that these two 

 apparently unrelated applications can work together efficiently. This infrastructure includes: 



^ A networked computing base that provides appropriate performance. 



ci Methods to provide security, privacy, and copyright protection, and other services such as "digi- 

 tal signatures" to authenticate transactions. 



Q Technical conventions and standards (especially for databases). 



-•Tools to build and support the user interfaces. 



3 Tools to build and support the applications themselves. 



The IITA component will demonstrate these technologies through testbed and pilot projects. These 

 projects will evaluate new technologies, provide training in their use. and demonstrate specific 

 National Challenge applications. Successful projects will serve as models to be further refined and 

 engineered for larger scale deployment. 



50 



