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-ra... 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 Preserving space archives: https://www.toboldlypreserve.space/