About The Project
The overall goal of the Pi-WRF project is to develop educational modules (teaching boxes), and to build a framework for community contribution of further modules. These modules are designed to teach weather concepts, including forecasting. The Pi-WRF software enables this by allowing learners to run an advanced weather model on a Raspberry Pi. As the official website for the Pi-WRF project, this website contains the Pi-WRF teaching boxes; each one of these teaching boxes contains a series of interactive lessons. All of these lessons have one thing in common; they all involve using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model to create forecasts. These lessons were specifically designed to run on a Raspberry Pi; however, users can run the Pi-WRF software on a laptop or desktop as well.
The Pi-WRF project also aims to create and facilitate a community of instructors, teachers, and faculty. This community will then create Pi-WRF teaching boxes covering a broad range of topics that will benefit multiple scientific communities. Teachers, students, and faculty from all across the globe can much more easily share teaching tools and creative ideas through Pi-WRF teaching boxes. This website is moderated by NCAR; in addition, NCAR staff will add an initial offering of teaching boxes, with lessons ranging from introductory to advanced. Some of the topics covered in these modules include:
- How to set up a Raspberry Pi and run Pi-WRF
- How to use Jupyter notebooks
- Meteorological concepts
- Computing principles such as parallel computing at exascale
The Pi-WRF team is pleased to invite you to use Pi-WRF teaching boxes in your classroom, and to download the teaching box materials. In addition, after downloading a teaching box, you can create your own case studies and teaching concepts by modifying it. The Pi-WRF team is also interested in submissions of modified teaching boxes. If you modify an existing teaching box, please submit it to the Pi-WRF team for inclusion on this website. By accepting both original and modified teaching boxes, the Pi-WRF project creates educational resources that are more in line with its community-driven model.
The Pi-WRF team also wishes to acknowledge the high-performance computing community for its work with the WRF model. The use of weather models (such as WRF) for weather forecasting and modeling has been a perennial challenge for the high-performance computing community. As such, we are happy to have been a part of the 2021 HPE Exascale day on October 18th, which celebrates supercomputing and the use of large-scale data.
Publications & Posters
- Foust, William (2020, Septber 2) An Informal Introduction to Numerical Weather Models with Low-Cost Hardware. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. 1-18. 10.1175/BAMS-D-20-0146.1.https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-20-0146.1
- Foust, E. (2021). Pi-WRF instructions. doi:10.5065/sdhd-ft24
- Olson, R.. (2021, August 11). Pi-WRF 3.0 (Version 1). figshare. https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.15152610.v1