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NOAA Goes Live With New Forecasting Supercomputers
dcblogs writes "The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Thursday switched on two new supercomputers that are expected to improve weather forecasting. The supercomputers are each 213 teraflops systems, running a Linux operating system on Intel processors. The U.S. is paying about $20 million a year to operate the leased systems. The NWS has a new hurricane model, Hurricane Weather Research and Forecasting (HWRF), which is 15% more accurate in day five of a forecast both for forecast track and intensity. That model is now operational and running on the new systems. In nine month, NWS expects to improve the resolution of the system from 27 kilometers to 13 kilometers. The European system, credited with doing a better job at predicting Sandy's path, is at 16 kilometers resolution. In June, the European forecasting agency said it had a deal to buy Cray systems capable of petascale performance."
I suspect if they removed the computers and installed windows in the offices of our local TV meteorologists we would get better short term forecasts. I've also decided that any precipitation forecast more than about 3-4 days out that doesn't involve a system as large as a hurricane is just a wild-ass guess*. Heck, even real time they're often wrong, the local guys are fond of reporting sunny all day while I'm actually looking outside at it raining.
*Well, unless you're in SoCal Mar-Dec, in which case "Sunny" is always the statistically correct answer, or Orlando/Daytona, where "It will rain at 3:45pm for 5 minutes" is always the statistically correct answer.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
HWRF runs at a much finer grid spacing than 27 or 13 kilometers. As I recall, the grid spacing is around 3 km in the inner nest. This is done to explicitly simulate the convection at the inner core of a tropical cyclone. This nest moves with the storm, and is embedded within a much larger domain. The upgrade from 27 to 13 kilometers actually refers to the GFS model. It's a spectral model that has a global domain. Other models that are regional (including the outer domain of the HWRF) need to know the conditions at their lateral boundaries, so they know what's moving into the domain. In the US, they typically use the GFS for their boundary conditions. I'm actually very skeptical of the need for upgrading the resolution of the GFS. That may have a role in improving GFS forecasts, but there have been studies showing that the initial conditions of the GFS are the real problem. The atmosphere is a chaotic system; that is, two similar initial states will diverge over time to produce two very different outcomes. In a study where the GFS was initialized with ECMWF initial conditions, the performance of the GFS improved. Hurricanes are typically steered by large scale features, which aren't necessarily going to be simulated better by using a finer resolution. It also doesn't address the initial conditions problem. I'm in favor of throwing more computing power at meteorology, but I'm not convinced it will solve the problems with the GFS.
When the machines take over, they'll be led by a core of weather-predicting super computers.
The only winning move is not to play.
Is their raw data available? I'd like a crack at it with my desktop computer.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
"The system uses so much power that its emissions directly influence the weather on all continents and mars."
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All people are greedy
I'm not. But that might have something to do with the fact that I'm certified. Perhaps we've finally reached the stage that what's natural for the individual isn't healthy for the society, and vice versa.
Ezekiel 23:20
That's a serious defect in the design of US employment laws. Employee benefits should be pro-rated with hours worked.
Please use American measurements, like rods and furlongs for distance.
I'm not.
That's why I don't use the word, greedy. It's just a negative connotation word for a class of interest. You might not be overly concerned with furthering your own interests, but that doesn't mean that you don't have interests which can cause just as much harm as greed can.
Perhaps we've finally reached the stage that what's natural for the individual isn't healthy for the society, and vice versa.
For example, this sentence indicates the possibility of unhealthy interests. What has changed so that individual interests are more unhealthy for society now than they've been in the past? I don't see it at all.
Instead, I see the opposite. In prehistoric times, tribes needed a great deal of cooperation from their members. Someone not pulling their load could kill other members of the tribe. That's no longer true. Now, we can pursue radically different beliefs or goals without causing a great deal of harm (unless, of course, the beliefs or goals are inherently harmful, like killing members of ethnic groups you dislike).
What I see nowadays is a society-level tendency to create public goods with the resulting tragedy of commons exploitation by the public, and then trying to stamp out this manifestation of individual self-interest rather than fixing or removing the public good that led to the problem in the first place.
Those people seem to have all sorts of problems with natural individual behavior. But those who anticipate human nature and account for that in their schemes don't have that kind of problem.
Supercomputers need data. The forecast for US weather satellites is partly cloudy.
Turbulence Ahead for Weather Satellites
JPSS
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
All people are greedy
I'm not. But that might have something to do with the fact that I'm certified. Perhaps we've finally reached the stage that what's natural for the individual isn't healthy for the society, and vice versa.
Sure, everyone says they aren't greedy and it's the other guy that's greedy, and that it's the other guy's greed that's the problem. That's right up there with "I'm not rich, the rich are only those with more money than me."
More Twoson than Cupertino
someone is making a killing, I think. the purchase cost of these computers should be under $30M total, and less than $3M/year to run.