Building a Dynamic Data Driven Application System for Hurricane Forecasting

The Louisiana Coastal Area presents an array of rich and urgent scientific problems that require new computational approaches. These problems are interconnected with common components: hurricane activity is aggravated by ongoing wetland erosion; water circulation models are used in hurricane forecasts, ecological planning and emergency response; environmental sensors provide information for models of different processes with varying spatial and time scales. This has prompted programs to build an integrated, comprehensive, computational framework for meteorological, coastal, and ecological models. Dynamic and adaptive capabilities are crucially important for such a framework, providing the ability to integrate coupled models with real-time sensor information, or to enable deadline based scenarios and emergency decision control systems. This paper describes the ongoing development of a Dynamic Data Driven Application System for coastal and environmental applications (DynaCode), highlighting the challenges of providing accurate and timely forecasts for hurricane events.