Winston
Lorenzo von Matterhorn
- Joined
- Jan 31, 2009
- Messages
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My question - why isn't this a cooperative international effort with open source, shared code and coding effort? Or is it already? My guess at the answer if it isn't - job protection within large national government bureaucracies.
US forecast models have been pretty terrible during Hurricane Irma
NOAA's best weather model seems to be getting worse with hurricanes, not better.
https://arstechnica.com/science/201...e-been-pretty-terrible-during-hurricane-irma/
We have written a fair amount at Ars recently about the superiority of the European forecast model, suggesting to readers that they focus on the ensemble runs of this system to get a good handle on track forecasts for Hurricane Irma. Then we checked out some of the preliminary data on model performance during this major hurricane, and it was truly eye-opening.
An independent expert on global forecast models, Ryan Maue, said the NOAA office responsible for developing US computer models, the National Centers For Environmental Prediction, is understaffed and has less funding than the European forecasting center, which is based in the United Kingdom. America, he said, is getting what it pays for.
"NOAA and the National Weather Service are stretched a mile and an inch deep in some places for all of the responsibilities that they have," said Maue, a research meteorologist at the Cato Institute. "If we want to focus on having the best weather forecast in the world, we should focus on having the best weather forecast."
[I'm not sure I buy the overworked excuse. Why not just use the European model code? - W]
Brian Tang, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Albany, tabulates data on "mean absolute error" [MAE] for the location of a storm's center at a given time and where it was forecast to be at that time. Hurricane Irma has been a thing for about a week now, so we have started to get a decent sample size—at least 10 model runs—to assess performance.
Legend:
AVNO: US Global Forecast System, or GFS. The premiere US global model
CMC: Canadian global model
UKM: UK Met Office global model
ECMWF: European global model
NGX: US Navy global model
HMON: New, experiment US hurricane model
HWRF: Operational US hurricane model
TVCN: Consensus model, essentially an average of the global models
OFCL: Official National Hurricane Center forecast
US forecast models have been pretty terrible during Hurricane Irma
NOAA's best weather model seems to be getting worse with hurricanes, not better.
https://arstechnica.com/science/201...e-been-pretty-terrible-during-hurricane-irma/
We have written a fair amount at Ars recently about the superiority of the European forecast model, suggesting to readers that they focus on the ensemble runs of this system to get a good handle on track forecasts for Hurricane Irma. Then we checked out some of the preliminary data on model performance during this major hurricane, and it was truly eye-opening.
An independent expert on global forecast models, Ryan Maue, said the NOAA office responsible for developing US computer models, the National Centers For Environmental Prediction, is understaffed and has less funding than the European forecasting center, which is based in the United Kingdom. America, he said, is getting what it pays for.
"NOAA and the National Weather Service are stretched a mile and an inch deep in some places for all of the responsibilities that they have," said Maue, a research meteorologist at the Cato Institute. "If we want to focus on having the best weather forecast in the world, we should focus on having the best weather forecast."
[I'm not sure I buy the overworked excuse. Why not just use the European model code? - W]
Brian Tang, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Albany, tabulates data on "mean absolute error" [MAE] for the location of a storm's center at a given time and where it was forecast to be at that time. Hurricane Irma has been a thing for about a week now, so we have started to get a decent sample size—at least 10 model runs—to assess performance.
Legend:
AVNO: US Global Forecast System, or GFS. The premiere US global model
CMC: Canadian global model
UKM: UK Met Office global model
ECMWF: European global model
NGX: US Navy global model
HMON: New, experiment US hurricane model
HWRF: Operational US hurricane model
TVCN: Consensus model, essentially an average of the global models
OFCL: Official National Hurricane Center forecast