They returned year after year because the weather models had been right.
Still, Mr. Hennig said, "The short-term weather models are not promising".
Using weather models adapted from ones designed for Earth, they can now predict even the wind flurries inside Gale Crater.
"I do think broadly my outlook has been vindicated, but economic models are as complicated as weather models.
twitter.com/TWCBreaking/st… February 8 , 20132.26pm GMT Here's the latest weather prediction from Harry Enten, our statistics expert, who also follows weather models.
Weather models essentially take every shred of available weather information and use them to form a three-dimensional picture of the atmosphere.
But there are literally countless other areas in which weather models fail in more subtle ways and rely on human correction.
So PlanetIQ, a start-up based in Bethesda, Md., is using a physics trick to get information from existing satellites and plug it into computerized weather models.
Dr. Joel N. Myers, the founder and president of the 39-year-old company, said it had dozens of meteorologists who constantly assessed the findings of the most advanced American, Canadian and European weather models.
But computer weather models have trouble picking out the boundaries of these 26C waters, so when meteorologists learned about the fish tracking study they jumped at the chance to use the satellite survey.
Although ProcessTree members will not know exactly what their computers are working on, their computers might be used for things like video animation, analyses of scientific and corporate research data, weather models and cryptography.
