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April 23, 2014

Simulation of Hurricane Sandy showing horizontal wind at 1000 meters

Two frames from a simulation of Hurricane Sandy showing wind at 1000 meters with horizontal wind vectors. Key features include a well-defined wind maximum (> 40 m/s) encircling Sandy's inner core, persistent throughout the simulation, and development of a well-defined outer radius wind maximum concurrent with cold air enrichment. Color indicates wind speed in m/s.

The simulation was created by a team of researchers from the U.S. National Science Foundation-supported National Center for Atmospheric Research and National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and by Cray Inc. Support was also given through NSF grants CCF 0325934 and ACI 0906379 and through a TeraGrid GIG award.

This research was discussed in a presentation titled "A research-community perspective of the life cycle of Hurricane Sandy," that was given at the American Meteorological Society's 2013 Townhall.

Technical details of the simulation were described in the Proceedings of SC13: International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis, in the article "Petascale WRF Simulation of Hurricane Sandy: Deployment of NCSA's Cray XE6 Blue Waters." (Date of Image: August 2013)

Credit: Alan Norton, Mel Shapiro, Tom Galarneau, Perry Domingo/NCAR; Peter Johnsen/Cray Inc.; Mark Straka/NCSA, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign


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