Utah Snow Ensemble

Research from the group of Jim Steenburgh

University of Utah Department of Atmospheric Sciences

The Utah Snow Ensemble is an 82-member ensemble for predicting snow over the contiguous western United States based on the ECMWF ensemble (ENS) and the US National Centers for Environmental Prediction Global Ensemble Forecast System (GEFS).

The forecasts are provided in 6-hour intervals out to 240 hours (10 days). They are produced on a CHPC-hosted node with as many as 60 CPUs. To produce these forecasts, the research group of Jim Steenburgh has to process 82 numerical forecasts and 40 forecast hours, pulling data from Amazon Web Services.

The random forest algorithm for producing snow-to-liquid ratio (used to convert water-equivalent precipitation forecasts to a snowfall amount and to ascertain snow properties for avalanche control work and other applications) was developed and trained on CHPC resources.

You can learn more about the Utah Snow Ensemble on the blog of Professor Jim Steenburgh, and you can view current data on weather.utah.edu by clicking on the "Utah Snow Ensemble" tab.

Attribution: This content was adapted from the blog of Jim Steenburgh.