The NOAA Climate Prediction Center (CPC) mission is to “Understand Climate Variability and Change to Enhance Society’s Ability to Plan and Respond.” Wyle Information Systems directly supports the CPC mission by providing support in three areas: climate prediction scientific research support; climate analysis, diagnostics, and programming support; and computer systems technical support. Support services include climate model assessment, inter- and intra-agency partnerships, multi-model ensembles, integrated climate assessment and seasonal climate prediction.
Space and Earth Sciences Data Analysis (SESDA) II staff develops, maintains, and operates the NASA Global Change Master Directory (GCMD). The GCMD staff is a team of software developers, outreach personnel, systems administrators, and web and database developers. GCMD is one of the NASA’s largest data portals, maintaining a high public profile. Metadata holdings include descriptions of NASA instrument data as well as data from other institutions, including the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and NOAA. Also included are metadata on data services which are linked to data itself. These are important functions in the era of cloud computing. Currently, the database holds more than 2,500 Service Metadata records and more than 25,000 Data Set Metadata Records. The staff maintains national and international partnerships in the Earth Science Community which helped contribute to the increasing popularity of GCMD. Recently, SESDA II staff implemented a new Climate Diagnostics Portal, providing users direct links to visualization data. GCMD also supports Near Real-time Data which is used worldwide for disaster management. Database hits increased dramatically recently following the Iceland volcano eruption and the Gulf Oil environmental disaster in 2010.
Wyle Information Systems develops animations of real-time satellite images, precipitation analyses and atmospheric circulations on spatial scales ranging from regional to global and temporal scales, and from diurnal to interannual. The staff conducts diagnostic studies of the links between weather extremes and climate variables (such as ENSO, AO, MJO, and PDO), also conducting diagnostic studies for CPC on trend and variability analysis of ozone and other climate variables. Wyle staff supports the development of hydro meteorological decision assistance packages such as the System for Convection Analysis and Nowcasting (SCAN) that improves accuracy and timeliness of warnings using real-time, multiple source inputs from NEXRAD weather radar, GOES satellite imagery, and Automated Surface Observing Systems (ASOS).
Supporting scientific software development in a parallel computing clustered architecture, Wyle develops research product algorithms, and creates Web applications, providing IT and science support for seasonal, decadal, and long-term climate modeling on high-performance computers (HPCs) at National Weather Service (NWS) National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP), the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and others. Wyle supported the scientific analysis and calibration of the Coupled Climate Forecast System (CFS) to identify and remove systematic bias in the monthly-seasonal forecasts using the CPC Morphing Technique (CMORPH) to produce global precipitation analyses at very high spatial and temporal resolution. This technique uses precipitation estimates that have been derived from low orbiter satellite microwave observations exclusively, and whose features are transported via spatial propagation information obtained entirely from geostationary satellite IR data.