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posted by chromas on Thursday June 13 2019, @02:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the wx dept.

The long-awaited upgrade to the US weather forecast model is here

Weather forecasters need a ton of knowledge and a fair bit of experience with local weather patterns to do their job well. They also need a good forecast model. These computer models take in measurements from weather stations on the ground, satellites in orbit, and balloons in between and then simulate the physics of weather forward in time a few days.

For the first time in about 40 years, the guts of the US model got swapped out for something new today. The upgrade brings us a new "Finite-Volume Cubed-Sphere" (or FV3) dynamical core, which simulates the basic atmospheric physics at the heart of this endeavor, a change that has been in the works for a while.

The new core had its origins in simulating atmospheric chemistry but ended up being adapted into other models. A few years ago, it was selected to replace the old core in the US Global Forecast System model. And for more than a year now, the new version of the model has been running in parallel so its results could be compared to the operational model.

[...] The results have been a little mixed. The new core improves computational efficiency and allows some processes to be simulated at a higher resolution [...] But there have also been grumblings in the weather community over the past year about results that didn't seem so hot. For example, surface temperatures have been biased low in some situations, throwing off forecasts.


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  • (Score: 2) by EvilSS on Thursday June 13 2019, @05:11PM (1 child)

    by EvilSS (1456) Subscriber Badge on Thursday June 13 2019, @05:11PM (#855199)
    Speak for yourself, I am eating cake right now!
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    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 3, Funny) by DeathMonkey on Thursday June 13 2019, @06:07PM

    by DeathMonkey (1380) on Thursday June 13 2019, @06:07PM (#855229) Journal

    If you only eat half of it you do get to eat your cake and have it too.