Mission: To save lives and minimize economic losses caused by weather-related disasters including avalanches, forest fires, windstorms, cyclones, floods, debris flows, air pollution, and greenhouse gases.

Focus: Disasters affecting mountainous, coastal regions, such as western Canada.

Approach: Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), where we use massively-parallel computers to solve the equations describing the atmosphere. These solutions will be made for a sequence of telescoping regions that zoom in from the large (100-1000 km) "synoptic" scales of Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP), through the medium (10-100 km)"mesoscales" of storm prediction and mountain topography, to the fine (0.1-10 km) "microscales" of turbulence.

Research: Both pure research, to better understand weather predictability and disaster physics, and applied research to make daily forecasts of weather and disasters.

Sponsors: The Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI), the British Columbia Knowledge Development Fund (BC KDF), and the Blusson foundation (UBC).

Role: The role of the Centre is to coordinate and facilitate the activities of all the researchers involved. The Centre is not a physical building (other than the Beowulf computer room), but is a virtual organization of collaborators. Regular internal seminars are held on campus to present progress in each of the areas; working groups are convened as needed to address common scientific and numerical hurdles; a colloquia series brings in visiting scientists from outside UBC; co-supervision of graduate students is managed; joint journal publications are encouraged and coordinated; results are disseminated at international conferences; and this web home page and mail servers link all the participants and allow data sharing and quick access to the findings. This web page will also serve as a connection to international groups working on other aspects of the high-resolution forecast problem.