National Weather Service Boots New Supercomputer

And to think, It's already obsolete!

320% better with 14 trillions calcs/sec.....

Maybe now they'll finally be able to predict this afternoon's weather without messing it up!

:)

If they look out the window before they speak, maybe.

Astrologers exist to make weather forecasters look respectable. What's your sign?

-e

I'm not against astrologers, don't get me wrong. But when the meteo person on the tube tells me that present temp is 10 deg C and sunny in Montreal and, looking out the window, I see that it's snowing, it makes me think that either their data is wrong or they just can't read it.

Rick@cae writes: "I'm not against astrologers, don't get me wrong. But when the meteo person on the tube tells me that present temp is 10 deg C and sunny in Montreal and, looking out the window, I see that it's snowing, it makes me think that either their data is wrong or they just can't read it."

------

My point, exactly.

I was in central Pennsylvania once visiting friends. With them was an Amish farmer whose name I don't recall, but all of us could hear someone's radio nearby. The forecaster was going on about how "tomorrow will be warm, dry, and sunny" or something like that. I saw the Amish guy quietly shaking his head in disbelief. This guy's livelihood depended on the weather, so you can bet he knew how to read the sky. Next day it was raining, and hard. Didn't see the sun at all that day.

One afternoon I was in Austin, Texas driving down I-35 and listening to the radio. The meteorologist girl was blabbing something about the afternoon's weather. Sunny, blah, blah, blah. Outside it was a frog drowner. I had to pull off the road because my wipers couldn't handle the load.

Astrologers..er..weather forecasters get a new computer. Great.

Even better would be for these professional morons to look out their windows once in awhile.

-e

Because of warming phenomena and increasing micro climates perhaps what you experienced was a very localised anomaly. Theweather is becoming more unstable and the more help the weather bureau has the better. Global warming is really screwing things up.

Laserloer

This possibly explains the fact that the Austin forecaster described conditions for that afternoon that were completely opposite the actual conditions that same afternoon - had she bothered but to look? I don't mean to sound au contrare, but the Amish guy knew exactly what was coming - rain. And boy did it rain.

How did he know? Real-world experience.

No this has nothing to do with micro climates or global warming, and everything to do with total reliance on technology coupled with a complete lack of intuition and common sense concerning the subject at hand. I guess I'd say the closest common analogy to what I'm seeing here is the car-insurance TV advert that shows the driver faithfully following the spoken directions of his auto GPS nav system, only to find himself suddenly parked halfway inside some poor sod's curbside diner after driving through the front window. Total faith in the technology and nary a lick of sense about the rest.

Time and time again I see these local stations boasting about their "Satellite/Computer Weather" forecasts, replete with with mediocre graphics and plastic meteorologists with too-tight ties and injection-molded doos boasting about how accurate their forecasts are. (As compared to what? Random chance?) One unabashed local station even has the conjones to call their hi-tech sideshow the "The Channel __ Accuweather Forecast" (hardly original, as I've heard other variations on the same tired theme in other cities). With each incremental improvement in technology, the more deeply embedded becomes the faith in such technology and the less emphasis upon real-world experience.

The best weather forecasters I've known were - you guessed it - farmers. The low-tech Mennonites and lower-tech Amish are the best weather forecasters ever, hands down. I'm pretty sure you won't find fully-configured IBM Blue Gene 360-TFlop machine squirreled away somewhere in Amos Stoltzfus' Back Forty. Makes one wonder just how many petaflops it may ultimately take to match the good common sense of one, single, experienced, low-tech Amish farmer, yes?

-e

While the "just look out the window" thing certainly has some validity, overall weather forecasting today is infinitely better than it was a few decades back.

To a large extent we are spoiled by the TV meteorologists and the perceived entertainment value of mass media weather reporting, along with the raised expectations it and better overall forecasting produce.

Given the present state of the art, the "coarseness" of the FEA (finite element analysis) grid, and refinement of the algorithms our predictive probability forecasts for "local" weather can still be much improved, but that also requires more weather stations reporting back specific real time local data in a given area.

Ride a motorcycle, and you become aware of how just the temperature changes a few degrees at times as you move from place to place in the same area. Not to mention that we have all seen the edge of a rainfall at some time.

In the world of computing, a 320% increase in computational power is not a big deal at all when applied to the 3D weather modeling programs, and any perceived improvement from increased computing power alone will be very small, if even detectable on a local scale, as the FEA grid size will only shrink a small amount.

On a larger scale, we do reasonably well in charting the course of storms already, and more satellite info will certainly have a noticeable effect there, making it even better for longer range forecasts. This will also have a bigger impact on local predictions than the new computer since the more "real" information fed into a predictive model, the less computing is required for the same resulting accuracy. Therefore between the two, a real statistical improvement will take place, but whether we "notice" it on a local scale is problematic.

C'mon, Ladeez 'n Gents!

Nobody on dry land over the age of 8 takes the weather guys seriously. The reason we all still watch them is because, when they forecast the weather we want, we all hope they're right!

And, fortunately for the souls in the air and at sea (and sometimes not so fortunately), where it's best to be prudent, they often are.

Methinks thou protests too much!

Mark

Blame it all on Globull Warming. We never get cold winters like this anymore because of globull warming. The weather actors try to cover large areas with a generalized forecast that will be right for somebody. You would be 50% right if you predicted that tomorrow's weather will be the same as today's.