Research Facilities

Physical Facilities

NRL’s Marine Meteorology Division is located in Monterey, California, on the grounds of the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) Annex, which is about a mile from the NPS main campus. As a tenant activity of NPS, the NRL facility is collocated with the Navy’s operational Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center (FNMOC) and with the NOAA National Weather Service Forecast Office in Monterey. The NPS Annex campus, which covers approximately five acres, comprises four primary buildings – one occupied exclusively by NOAA, one that houses both the NRL and FNMOC supercomputer/ operational facilities, and two large buildings containing office space, computer laboratories, and conference facilities that are shared by FNMOC and NRL personnel. The site also provides recreational facilities.

Supercomputing Facilities for NWP

Collocation of NRL’s Marine Meteorology Division with FNMOC provides NRL efficient access to a variety of classified and unclassified computer resources and databases to support development and transition of operational analysis and prediction systems. In addition, interfaces to the Defense Research and Engineering Network provides access to the extensive DOD High Performance Computing resources at multiple locations around the country, including the Distributed Center in Monterey. To support additional R&D needs, NRL Monterey has established the Roger Daley Supercomputer Resource Center. The Daley Supercomputer is an Origin 2000, 128-processor SGI that is used, along with a 10 TB Storage Area Network and high-performance graphics workstations, to conduct numerical weather prediction experiments, perform simulation studies, and execute beta tests for proposed operational system upgrades in a pseudo-operational environment with real-time observational data.

Data Achival Facilities

The Bergen Data Center (BDC) provides a data archival capability for meteorological and oceanographic data. The facility includes an SGI server, two Sun servers, and StorageTek tape libraries handling archives and backup for the BDC, with a total storage capacity of 31 TB. Veritas Hierarchical Storage Manager (HSM), Netbackup, and First Watch software packages are used to manage data storage. 

The BDC also operates as a resource site for the Master Environmental Library (MEL), a distributed repository system of environmental information with a single user access site. The MEL facilitates discovery, acess, subscription, and delivery of environmental information, products, and data wherever they are stored. It supports models and simulations for training, analysis, and acquisition through a single user interface to numerous DOD and non-DOD Resource Sites. MEL promotes interoperability among simulation users by facilitating reuse of environmental information, products, and data. MEL supports the warfighter as well as the non-DOD and commercial communities. At the BDC, data older than 30 days are physically archived within the HSM file systems but can also be retrieved logically on-line.

Satellite Data Processing Facility

The Marine Meteorology Division’s satellite data processing facility collects and processes one of the world’s most complete near real-time global digital data set from multiple satellite sensors. A suite of Unix workstations and software process these data streams and enable researchers to rapidly collocate multiple satellite sensors/channels for a wide range of meteorological applications anywhere on the globe. Hardware/software compatibility with the Fleet enhances rapid prototyping and transition to operations. 
The facility includes two geostationary receiving systems to capture real-time GOES-West and GOES-East data. Digital data from three other geostationary satellites (GMS-5, Meteosat-7&5) are gathered from FNMOC to enable true global coverage with visible, infrared, and water vapor channel data using SeaSpace’s TeraScan hardware. An SMQ-11 polar orbiter antenna system collects data from NOAA and Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) satellites. Data from additional global polar orbiter satellites are obtained through collaborative agreements with other government agencies (NASA, NOAA, Air Force, Navy), significantly reducing on-site infrastructure needs and bringing the total number of polar orbiter satellites available for research at NRL Monterey to 13 (TMI, MODIS (2), SeaWIFS, SSM/I (3), AMSU-B (3), AMSR-E, AVHRR (2)).

Classified Radar and Satellite Data Processing Facility

This facility offers a classified processing site for satellite data, weather radar level II and level III data, and AN/SPY1 radar data, and also provides a gateway for the movement of unclassified data and products from the unclassified processing facilities into the classified facility. This facility also contains the hardware/software suite needed to run the NRL on-scene mesoscale numerical weather prediction model COAMPS-OS™ using both classified and unclassified data. The facility also provides connectivity to the DOD SIPRNET (Secure Internet) for NRL scientists, who can use this connection to provide demonstration products to shipboard and other remote customers.

John B. Hovermale Laboratory

This laboratory provides computer facilities and expertise to support on-scene numerical weather predictions and nowcasting , including access to operational Navy databases and visualization tools. The laboratory provides efficient access to unclassified and classified networks, databases, and computational resources. Access to these assets aids in the development, integration, and testing of a wide range of end-user applications including on-scene data fusion, data assimilation, and prediction models, tactical environmental data servers, atmospheric analysis and nowcast systems, visualization applications and briefing tools, and web-based data and product dissemination capabilities. In addition to providing hardware resources and data for research projects and demonstrations, dedicated technical experts provide code examples and database consulting to on-site and off-site developers. A key to successfully demonstrating new and innovative capabilities to users and to sponsors is end-to-end data connectivity.

Mobile Atmospheric Aerosol and Radiation Characterization Observatory (MAARCO)

This facility, known as MAARCO, is a transportable laboratory containing scientific instrumentation for measuring atmospheric aerosols, trace gases, chemistry, radiative properties, cloud structure and meteorology. The instrumentation suite includes a lidar, a Sun photometer, radiometers, particle probes, filter samplers, and impactors. The mobile laboratory allows NRL scientists and their collaborators to study the atmosphere during field campaigns.

Library Facilities

NRL Monterey shares a small library with Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center. This on-site library maintains current and past copies of most of the U.S. and many of the international journals dedicated to the atmospheric, oceanographic, and computational sciences; copies of NRL technical reports and memorandum; and a number of reference books and scientific books in the mathematical and earth sciences. NRL also has access to the Ruth H. Hooker Library , located at the Laboratory’s main site in Washington, D.C. The Ruth H. Hooker Library houses a collection of over 35,000 circulating and reference books, 1200 current journal subscriptions, 60,000 bound journal volumes, and over a million technical reports stored as digital images, paper copy, and microfiche. Additionally, NRL Monterey scientists are frequent users of the Research Library's Infoweb gateway, which provides on-line access to a large number of journals and other publications. Locally in Monterey, we also have access to the Naval Postgraduate School's Dudley Knox Library.