Visualizing Extreme Weather Events from the WRF Simulation

Overview

KVL in collaboration with Prof. Ibrahim Hoteit's group visualized a simulation of the extreme rain event that happened in Jeddah on November 22, 2022. This event caused massive damage from flooding, so understanding how this storm formed and ways that it could have been better predicted in order to warn the population is critical.

Work Summary

Extreme rainfall events can devastate infrastructure and public life and potentially induce substantial financial and life losses. Although weather alert systems generate early rainfall warnings, predicting the impact areas, duration, magnitude, occurrence, and characterization as an extreme event is challenging. Scientists analyze previous extreme rainfall events to examine the factors such as meteorological conditions, large-scale features, relationships and interactions between large-scale features and mesoscale features, and the success of simulation models in capturing these conditions at different resolutions and their parameterizations. In addition, they may also be interested in understanding the sources of anomalous amounts of moisture that may fuel such events. Many factors play a role in the development of these events, which vary depending on the locations. In this work, we implement a visualization environment that supports domain scientists in analyzing simulation model outputs configured to predict and analyze extreme precipitation events. This environment enables visualization of important local features and facilitates understanding the mechanisms contributing to such events. We present a case study of the Jeddah extreme precipitation event on November 24, 2022, which caused great flooding and infrastructure damage.

With this work we analyzed output from the WRF simulation, Weather Research and Forecasting, simulation run at a fine temporal resolution on Shaheen II. This resulted in a large amount of data that necessitated the design of the visualization environment to quickly process and visualize the simulation results.

The paper is being published at IEEE VIS EnviroVis: Visualization Environment for Analyzing Extreme Rainfall Events: A Case Study, J. Kress, S. Afzal, H.P. Dasari, S. Ghani, A. Zamreeq, A. Ghulam, I. Hoteit

Impact

This paper demonstrates state-of-the-art visualization for climate science and helps the KAUST Climate Change Center work towards creating models that can be used to predict weather more accurately to save both lives and property in the Kingdom.