[SIGCIS-Members] new line of research?

[Jonathan Coopersmith]

>From the July 29 Economist:


There is also a growing demand for faster or more specific forecasts than
can be provided by public institutions (which, being mostly funded by
taxpayers, tend to produce what will be the most helpful to the most
people). Private companies are filling the gaps.

In 2016, for instance, ibm, an American computing firm, bought the Weather
Company, which specialised in combining different governmental models, for
an estimated $2bn. (Sceptics joked that ibm had invested in the wrong type
of cloud.) Within a year the firm began selling “hyper-local” forecasts to
businesses, designed to predict the weather in a small area between two and
12 hours ahead. By 2020, according to Comscore, an American media-analytics
firm, ibm was the biggest provider of weather forecasts in the world.

The firm’s success stems, in part, from its freedom to pick its own
priorities. Predicting the weather only a few hours ahead drastically
reduces the amount of number-crunching required. That, says Peter Neilley,
the Weather Company’s chief meteorologist, allowed the firm to develop a
global model with a 3km resolution that churns out a new forecast once an
hour. (The ecmwf’s high-resolution global model, by contrast, produces a
new forecast every six hours.)


https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2023/07/26/the-high-tech-race-to-improve-weather-forecasting
Stay sane,

Jonathan

Jonathan Coopersmith
Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science

Professor Emeritus
Department of History
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX  77843-4236
979.739.4708 (cell)

John Mather "Instrument Maker to the Stars,"
<https://aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org/departments/instrument-maker-to-the-stars/>
 *Aerospace America* November 2023
"Technological obsolescence,
<https://www.nationalacademies.org/news/2023/05/technological-obsolescence>"
National Academy of Engineering *Perspectives* May 23, 2023
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