Dubai Operational Forecasting System in Amazon Cloud

In 2011, RPS Group, PLC, Applied Science Associates ASA was contracted to design an operational Meteorological and Oceanographic (MetOcean) forecasting system covering the Persian/Arabian Gulf and coastal waters near Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The system was designed to provide daily forecasts out to 120 h (5 days) for atmospheric and oceanographic parameters using the Weather Research and Forecasting atmospheric model, the Regional Ocean Modeling System hydrodynamic model, and the unstructured Simulating WAves Nearshore wave model. Following the design and calibration phase, the forecast system was installed locally in Dubai. It was realized that infrastructure support and network requirements challenged the system's reliability to routinely create automated forecasts. A decision was made to transfer the operations of the system to the cloud, specifically the Amazon Web Services cloud infrastructure, which offered several high-performance computing options in various regions globally. Transition to the cloud took approximately 4 months of development and testing, with the system being transferred to the cloud in early 2013, in which it continues to run. The cloud implementation process led to the discovery of many benefits, including rapid, cost-effective development and testing of system updates and changes in a parallel environment. The continuous upgrading of the underlying Amazon infrastructure have reduced the initial 2013 cloud runtime from over 5 h to just over 2 h for current runs. The Gulf MetOcean Forecast System provides a valuable example of utilizing regionally diverse cloud computing resources to mitigate infrastructure limits and challenges in certain regions globally where support for high-performance, scientific computing is limited or unavailable. The system has realized its original goal of being a robust, scalable global MetOcean forecasting solution and continues to remain a cost-effective and viable option for providing cutting-edge MetOcean forecasting worldwide.