High resolution numerical weather forecasting to aid AMOS

The Hawaiian Islands contains a variety of microclimates in a very small region. Some islands have rainforests within a few miles of deserts; some have 10,000 feet summits only a few miles away from the coastline. Because of this, weather models must be run at a much finer resolution to accurately predict in these regions. NCAR´s mesoscale model version 5 (MM5) if run from a coarse 27 km resolution (surrounding an area of approximately 5000 by 5000 km) nested down to a 1 km resolution daily. Since the computational requirements are high to accomplish this in a reasonable time frame (as to still be a forecast) MM5 is run in parallel on MHPCC´s IBM SP3 & SP4. Utilizing 32 processors the MM5 model is run over the above conditions in approximately 7 hours. These forecast have been in place over two years now and are being utilized by operators at the telescope operators on Haleakala, Maui.