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Math Earth Supercomputing Science

How Weather Modeling Gets Better 43

Dr_Ish writes: Bob Henson over at Weather Underground has posted a fascinating discussion of the recent improvements made to the major weather models that are used to forecast hurricanes and the like. The post also included interesting links that explain more about the models. Quoting: "The latest version of the ECMWF model, introduced in May, has significant changes to model physics and the ways in which observations are brought into and used within the model. The overall improvements include better portrayal of clouds and precipitation, including a more accurate depiction of intense rainfall. The main effect of the model upgrade for tropical cyclones is slightly lower central pressure. During the first 3 days of a forecast, the ECMWF has tended to have a slight weak bias on tropical cyclones; the new version is closer to the mark."
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How Weather Modeling Gets Better

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  • I just wish Weather Underground hadn't been taken over by The Weather Channel and, more to the point, their Web dev team. WU was an outstanding source for quick, concise reports on current weather, weather history, and news. Apparently they still post interesting content from time to time, but it just isn't worth my while to go slogging through the "new, improved UI" to get to it.

    I still do pull it up for local conditions and radar; if I'm not in a hurry, it gives me the info I need, at least when I'm on my

    • I haven't been running public-facing Web projects lately, but if I go back to it, I'll insist that we test on something other than a fast LAN connection and giant screen. The current team at WU obviously doesn't do that.

      It seems to me like low-resolution displays are becoming rare on PCs, and like they expect you to use a mobile site or an app on your more portable devices. I have some of those poky old PCs with little screens too, and it's become a bit frustrating using them. Maybe they have a more noble purpose, like becoming part of an art project. Pip-boy, anyone? :p

    • And even with all that AJAX and screen real estate, they still dumbed it down to the point of near-uselessness. Try finding the conditions graphs for the past, even just yesterday. Try finding tide info.

      There ought to be an open weather project for people to submit personal weather station feeds to. I would have been happy to contribute to independent Wunderground, but TWC? No way.

    • by antdude ( 79039 )

      Ditto. I miss their classic designs. Now, if we could get accurate readings from all these weather sites. They all say different things!

  • Isn't weather forecasting just solving PDEs?

    • Isn't weather forecasting just solving PDEs?

      ...in four dimensions, with complex boundary conditions.

      It would be hard even if partial differential equations were not chaotic.

      http://arxiv.org/abs/0909.0910 [arxiv.org]

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Yes, but it's not that simple.

      The partial differential equations you're referring to are the Navier-Stokes equations, which have no known analytical solution. Instead, they're solved numerically with atmospheric data on a three dimensional grid. There are still a few problems here:

      1) Although dx, dy, dz, and dt are pretty small these days, an order of magnitude lower than a couple of decades ago, we don't have in situ observations every dx, dy, and dz. You might have a few grid points in each county of the

  • Interesting to note that the 5-day forecast intensity error for 2014 is lower than 1, 2, 3, or 4 day error..
  • by Anonymous Coward

    Dr. Masters' article is about numerical models that are used for hurricane forecasting. There is nothing simple about hurricane forecasting.

    1) The atmosphere is a chaotic system. Small errors in the initial state grow exponentially as the model is integrated forward. There aren't many in situ observations over the oceans, so the initial state of the model is generally less accurate there than over land. Forecasts produced will also have larger errors.

    2) A wide range of models are discussed here ranging from

    • I'm trying to read Dr. Masters's article. It's very annoying that as I'm reading something down the page a bit, the page suddenly reloads on me, I assume because the ad at the top is refreshing. I'm bumped back to the top of the page and lose my place.

      Why is advertising so much more important than the information on the page?

      Why do companies have so much money they spend it on nefarious, intrusive advertising tricks? Obviously we have plenty of production capacity and the real problem companies are trying t

  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    Too bad some idiots stole the domain from the original group back in 90's that wanted it as an archive.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Now open source weather prediction is possible, these days. You can download the required weather initialisation files and the prediction engine. The only problem is noone has made open source for it. There is free RASP (see http://www.drjack.info and http://www.drjack.info/cgi-bin/rasp-forum.cgi and http://www.drjack.info/twiki/bin/view/RASPop/WebHome ) but it is not open and has maintenance issues. The hard part is validating and tweaking for a region.

    A RASP operator (I can't even install it...).

    • Open source weather prediction involves obtaining the data and running a numerical model.

      There are a lot of acronyms for weather models in the comments such as the HWRF, HRRR, RAP, and NAM. All of the those models are actually various configurations of the Weather Research & Forecasting (WRF) model. Other models like the GFS, UkMet, and ECMWF are different and aren't based on the WRF. You can download WRF and compile it yourself. It's actually not that hard. The site is http://www2.mmm.ucar.edu/wrf/user [ucar.edu]

There is no opinion so absurd that some philosopher will not express it. -- Marcus Tullius Cicero, "Ad familiares"

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