ProWis: A Visual Approach for Building, Managing, and Analyzing Weather Simulation Ensembles at Runtime

TL;DR

ProWis is an interactive system designed to assist weather experts in building, managing, and analyzing complex weather simulation ensembles efficiently at runtime, reducing manual effort and errors.

Contribution

It introduces a provenance-oriented, human-in-the-loop system for real-time management and analysis of weather simulation ensembles, developed with expert collaboration.

Findings

Effective management of weather ensembles demonstrated in case studies

Enhanced exploration of atmospheric variables and scenarios

Reduced manual errors in weather simulation workflows

Abstract

Weather forecasting is essential for decision-making and is usually performed using numerical modeling. Numerical weather models, in turn, are complex tools that require specialized training and laborious setup and are challenging even for weather experts. Moreover, weather simulations are data-intensive computations and may take hours to days to complete. When the simulation is finished, the experts face challenges analyzing its outputs, a large mass of spatiotemporal and multivariate data. From the simulation setup to the analysis of results, working with weather simulations involves several manual and error-prone steps. The complexity of the problem increases exponentially when the experts must deal with ensembles of simulations, a frequent task in their daily duties. To tackle these challenges, we propose ProWis: an interactive and provenance-oriented system to help weather experts build, manage, and analyze simulation ensembles at runtime. Our system follows a human-in-the-loop approach to enable the exploration of multiple atmospheric variables and weather scenarios. ProWis was built in close collaboration with weather experts, and we demonstrate its effectiveness by presenting two case studies of rainfall events in Brazil.