Weather Radar Goes Miniature

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Posted by michael on Tuesday September 30, 2003 @06:03AM from the button-up-your-overcoat dept.

quackking writes "As reported today in the Boston Globe, the NSF has committed at least $17M to build out a new network of miniature (at least in comparison with today's monsters) weather radars. This is to radar what Beowulf clusters are to the mainframe; the scientists at U Mass Amherst project that eventually a weather radar node will be deployable for under $20K! Now to figure out how to get real-time access to this mesh of sensors and create a really cool screensaver..."

3 of 167 comments (clear)

Weather Sensor Array by Xaroth · 2003-09-30 06:09 · Score: 5, Interesting

I've always thought that wide-spread weather research could be enhanced in an even lower-cost fashion. If basic sensor arrays (wind speed / direction, humidity, temperature, pressure, and whatever else you can fit in there) powered by solar panels could be deployed for less than $200 per station, you could litter the nation with them spaced out every couple of miles in a grid. Then, have them all phone home (they could repeat their own traffic to reduce reliance on other networks) to a high-powered computer (or via a distributed network, a la SETI@home) to determine weather patterns.

Granted, low cost radars like this are a step towards getting high-resolution data for more areas, but something like what I've described could possibly help answer larger climate-related questions.

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That green slime had it coming.
1. Re:Weather Sensor Array by Sevn · 2003-09-30 06:23 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  Wow, pretty insightful considering that's basically what's already happening. :) Although the reporting stations aren't every mile. That would be kinda overkill I think. When I was a weatherman (10 year ago), there were somewhere in the neighborhood of 550-600 reporting stations that did hourly weather observations syncronized with ZULU time, aka UTC, aka GMT. Some weather reporting stations are completely automated, but they are limited. There are some things like skycover and accurately representing highly variable conditions that an automated weather station simply can't do. Other than the hourly observations that are taken and disseminated, there are "special" observations that are taken when special conditions are met. I don't have an FMH-B handy, and I can't recall them all off the top of my head, but it's for things like radical changes in wind direction, speed, ceiling height, visibility, thunderstorm activity, etc. Most weather reporting stations are near airports because weather is very important for forcasting flight weather condition. That and a majority of weather stations are USAF or other military. All that data ends up in a system called AWDS (Automated Weather Distribution System) that has 3 super computing "hubs". If I'm not mistaken, two of them are here in the US, and one is in England. Those numbers are then turned into NGM's and GSM's and other Nested Gridded Models that are still not perfect and need corrected slightly by a good forecaster. With that data the 6 hourly forecasts are generated and issued so that local TV Weatherman can steal them and use them. I can remember one time in Deleware, we intentionally put a forecasted high temp for the day 6 degrees too high and watched 3 of the local channels quote it.
  
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  For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
Re:MOD THEM DOWN by warpSpeed · 2003-09-30 06:23 · Score: 5, Funny

Oh, God! 10 comments and ALL 10 are silly jokes about Beowulf clusters. If we need a Beowulf cluster then that would be to scan /. traffic and filter such stupid jokes out.
Can we at least install on /. some neural-network scanners that would mod all such obsolete jokes down?
Perhaps a perl plugin module where you can upload your own filter code to prescan the comments....
/. would probably need a cluster of some sort to run it though...