EAS Assistant Professor Travis O'Brien's research using Big Red supercomputer is featured on IT News and Events
Quoting IT News and Events: "Undergraduate researchers in Travis O’Brien’s lab are using Indiana University’s high-powered computing resources to learn climate modeling techniques that reveal new insights into everyday weather patterns.
IU hosts multiple climate modeling applications used in O’Brien’s research and teaching. One is called TECA, which stands for the Toolkit for Extreme Climate Analysis, and provides cutting-edge data analysis of complex weather events using high performance computing (HPC) systems like Big Red 200 and Carbonate, facilitated by IU’s Research Technologies and National Science Foundation (NSF) funding.
His research helps better define the nature of today’s extreme weather events. For example, using TECA modeling, he was able to show that the 2021 flood of Kirkwood Avenue in Bloomington was an atmospheric river. “People usually think about atmospheric rivers as being a West Coast phenomenon, but living in the Midwest, I see them all the time,” said O’Brien. “I want to establish the fact that yes, they do happen here, so we customize TECA to look at the meteorology of atmospheric rivers to show the similarities. There is a large amount of knowledge related to this weather pattern on the West Coast, and now forecasters in the Midwest can tap into this knowledge.”
The College of Arts