NASA High-End Computing: Feature Stories

07.09.25 - SMAP Radiance Assimilation Over Land Improves Analysis and Prediction of Tropical Cyclone Idai: A recently published paper from NASA Global Modeling and Assimilation Office (GMAO) scientists shows how data assimilation of soil moisture into GEOS — running at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) — can help improve modeling of tropical cyclones that interact with land.

06.23.25 - GMAO Campaign Support Highlights Versatility and Range of Product Capabilities: Every year, NASA’s Global Modeling and Assimilation Office (GMAO) sponsors up to a dozen or more in-situ Earth observing field campaigns. Vital to campaign supports are the GMAO's GEOS-Forward Processing (GEOS-FP) and GEOS-Composition Forecasting (GEOS-CF) models, the DataPortal, and FLUID visualization system — all running at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS).

06.12.25 - SAGE III/ISS Data Assimilation System Effective In Reducing Stratospheric Observational Data Gaps: With the primary tool for vital stratospheric water vapor observations set to reach the end of its life, a new data assimilation system (DAS) developed by past and current Global Modeling and Assimilation Office (GMAO) scientists can help fill in future data gaps using other existing sensors. The new GMAO DAS runs at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS).

05.29.25 - NASA Enables Detectability Simulations of a Surface Biosignature on a Proxima Centauri b-Like Planet with Future Space Observatories: The NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies' ROCKE-3D general circulation model, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center's Planetary Spectrum Generator (PSG), and the NASA Scientific Computing Project's high-performance computing resources combined to enable a study exploring the feasibility of searching for signs of life from the surface of a Proxima Centauri b-like planet.

04.25.25 - The Stratospheric Sudden Warming of March 2025 Abruptly Ended the NH Stratospheric Polar Vortex: A cold stratospheric polar region characterized most of the NH winter of 2024-2025, with a major final warming in early March. The NASA Global Modeling and Assimilation Office’s GEOS-FP and GEOS-S2S products were able to forecast and characterize the evolution of this SSW event. GEOS-FP and GEOS-S2S run at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS).

03.25.25 - Critical Simulations of L.A. County Fires Run on NAS Supercomputers: Supercomputers at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility are used to simulate fire scenarios for a variety of circumstances, such as predicting fire damage in the Vehicle Assembly Building at Kennedy Space Center during a hypothetical ignition of solid rocket boosters. Most recently, scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory urgently needed our resources and support services to produce very high-resolution simulations of the extreme wind and fire behavior during the January 2025 fires in the Los Angeles area..

03.19.25 - Scientists Simulate the Electrical Dynamics of Thundersnow at NCCS: In a first-of-a-kind study, NASA, university, and industry scientists simulated the electrical dynamics of thundersnow — lightning within snowfall — at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS).

03.14.25 - New Grace Hopper Nodes Double the Power of NASA's Cabeus Supercomputer: As part of the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division’s goal to provide NASA with the computing power needed to support the agency’s missions and programs, 350 NVIDIA Grace Hopper nodes were added to the Cabeus supercomputer, providing more than 13 petaflops of computing power and more than doubling Cabeus’ total peak capability.

03.14.25 - GEOS-FP Excels at Predicting Presidents' Week Mid-Atlantic Snowfall: A large snowstorm struck the Mid-Atlantic just after Presidents' Day. While many NWP models had to shift their snowfall locations in the days leading up the event, GEOS-FP had the snowstorm correctly forecasted from the beginning. GEOS-FP runs daily at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS).

03.03.05 - Going With the Flow: Visualizing Ocean Currents with ECCO: NASA scientists and collaborators built the ECCO model to be the most realistic, detailed, and continuous depiction of the ocean ever developed. ECCO runs at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Facility. Read the story, watch the video, and look at the many new visualizations..

02.27.25 - NASA Supercomputer Finds Billions of Comets Mimicking the Milky Way’s Shape: Spirals are a repeating theme in astronomy, with arguably the most famous example of a swirling armed structure being our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Now, using NASA's powerful Pleiades supercomputer, scientists have discovered yet another spiral structure on the edge of our solar system.

01.31.25 - How Does the Atmosphere Affect Ocean Weather?: The NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) helped enable University of Rochester research revealing the surprising ways atmospheric winds influence ocean eddies, shaping the ocean’s weather patterns in more complex ways than previously believed.

01.30.25 - Uncertainty Quantification for Air Quality Forecasting using Multiple Data Sources: Enabled by the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS), NASA Global Modeling and Assimilation Office scientists have continued their work on air quality forecasting by using various phases to lessen the level of uncertainty. See how these results can help improve forecasts and inform the public on dangerous air quality in advance.

01.16.25 - NASA Scientists Find New Human-Caused Shifts in Global Water Cycle: In a recently published paper, NASA scientists use nearly 20 years of observations to show that the global water cycle is shifting in unprecedented ways. The majority of those shifts are driven by activities such as agriculture and could have impacts on ecosystems and water management, especially in certain regions. The scientists leveraged the NASA Center for Climate Simulation (NCCS) in their study.

01.03.25 - NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) 2024 Wrap-Up: As we start the new year, take some time to check out these intriguing NASA projects—all led by experts in the NAS Division in 2024. These 12 endeavors focus on improving life on Earth and on learning more about how things work in the universe! All were presented last November at SC24, the International Conference for High-Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis, in Atlanta, Georgia.

FEATURE STORIES