He likens high-resolution forecasting to a high-powered rifle.
The I.B.M. researchers produce high-resolution forecasts twice a day, both for prospective customers and for their own analysis as they increase the power of their simulation models.
Private companies, particularly in America but in other parts of the world as well, have now stepped in to provide high-resolution forecasts for particular markets and industries.
Clifford F. Mass, a professor in the department of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington, said that while high-resolution forecasts were improving, there was a potential for big mistakes.
IBM, for example, uses its own network of weather stations to evaluate the accuracy of its high-resolution forecasts.At the same time, the mathematical models are also being upgraded to cope with finer forecasting grids.
High-resolution forecasting already requires more processing power to provide a forecast for a given area within a given time: halving the grid spacing (from 12km to 6km, for example) increases the amount of computing power needed fourfold.
In other words, the more detail, the better.Bridgeline, a company that operates gas pipelines in Louisiana, uses AccuWeather's high-resolution forecasts to monitor "severe weather events" in the Gulf of Mexico that could affect gas supply.
Do I stop the train or not?"Another problem with the ensemble approach, particularly for high-resolution forecasting, is that it requires far more computing power, since every forecast must be repeated several times and there may not be time to do that before the forecast has gone out of date.
Instead of running a model 20 or 30 times, this involves comparing a new forecast with existing forecasts from other sources, such as government weather services, in order to assess the plausibility of its projections.Computing horsepower is not the only impediment to providing more accurate high-resolution forecasts.
Within Flanders (Belgium), which is characterized by a highly sprawled urban network and a sealed surface density much higher than in many other European metropolitan regions, there is a strong need for more accurate high-resolution forecasting of soil sealing densities.
