Agreement paves way for U.S. to accelerate use of weather, climate model improvements
February 7, 2019
The United States is making exciting changes to how computer models will be developed in the future to support the nation’s weather and climate forecast system. NOAA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) have joined forces to help the nation’s weather and climate modeling scientists achieve mutual benefits through more strategic collaboration, shared resources and information.
The organizations recently signed a Memorandum of Agreement establishing a new partnership to design a common modeling infrastructure that will be transparent and easy to access and use by public and private researchers, including academia and industry. By leveraging efficiencies and synergies, reducing duplication of effort, and creating shared model repositories, future research advances will more quickly benefit the public through better weather and climate forecasts.
“Historically, different architectures for developing weather and climate models across the public and private sector created challenges for implementing the very best systems quickly,” said Neil Jacobs, Ph.D., NOAA assistant secretary of commerce for environmental observation and prediction. “This new framework streamlines the entire process and gives both researchers and forecasters the same tools across the weather enterprise to accelerate the development of forecast models.”
The agreement establishes the governance to allow NOAA and NCAR to prioritize and coordinate existing and ongoing investments. It does not replace existing governance structures or commit new funding for collaborative work.
The agreement marks a fundamental shift towards community modeling, which is a concept that will enable the entire weather enterprise to accelerate the transition of new approaches from research into operations. It also allows NOAA to transition to a Unified Forecast System (UFS), which is a community-based, coupled comprehensive weather and climate modeling system with its partners.
NCAR brings considerable expertise to the partnership, as its scientists have worked with the research community for many years to develop community weather and climate models.
“By combining NCAR’s community modeling expertise with NOAA’s excellence in real-time operational forecasting, this agreement will accelerate our ability to predict weather and climate in ways that are vital for protecting life and property,” said Antonio Busalacchi, president of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, which manages NCAR on behalf of the National Science Foundation. “This will enable the nation to produce world-class models that are second to none, generating substantial benefits for the American taxpayer.”
Additionally, NOAA is taking steps to establish a new Earth Prediction Innovation Center, made possible by the recent reauthorization of the Weather and Research Forecasting Innovation Act of 2017. The virtual Center will enable the research community to develop new and emerging model technology that can be quickly transitioned into forecast operations at NOAA’s National Weather Service. The operational global Earth system models will be made available to the research community to support scientific and research work.
“The Earth Prediction Innovation Center, UFS, and the joint NOAA/NCAR agreement are critical elements that will position the U.S. to regain its standing as a leader on the international earth-system modeling stage. The improved modeling capability will improve our life-saving watches and warnings,” Jacobs added.
With a new stage set for community modeling, NOAA is poised to upgrade the Global Forecasting System in the months ahead with the addition of a new dynamic core, called the FV3. The FV3-based GFS will be the first NOAA application derived from community modeling and will improve forecast accuracy.
Together, NOAA and NCAR are working with partners across the weather and climate modeling enterprise to deliver the best products and infrastructure that enable forecasters to save lives and protect property nationwide.
HT/Yooper
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Will any of the new toys directly simulate thunderstorms? Will the code generate numerical hailstones, and will the associated updrafts be reported? I didn’t think so. Granted, perhaps there will be some useful advances in weather forecasting. But because the real atmosphere exhibits its most powerful heat-engine performance at small scale and high velocities, the new toys are not likely to simulate what really happens to heat with any more authority than the old ones.
The biggest concern would be if you don’t play along with the consensus model you get pushed out. So will it end up as a pal review system where new improvements and innovations are ignored?
I’m the fist one to hope for more reliable and accurate finely localized weather forecasts.
However in the actual political green robbery context, “The Earth Prediction Innovation Center….” sounds like a hi-tech version of those traditional little Tyrolian wooden home weather toys.
Expect sun when the lady is out, wind and rain when the gentleman appears.
A cynical reading of the situation would say somebody is concerned he’s not getting the money he wants for his model because it’s going to rivals. This looks like a consolidation effort to squeeze them out. It’s wrapped in language about collaboration to make it sound like an efficiency move. Openness and transparency are anathema to people protecting their turf. No doubt, some of the principals involved want to do better, but there’s always an underbelly in politics.
This statement has just gotta make you feel “all warm n’ comphy” all over more than anyplace else by knowing that Big Government is going to protect you from harm and save you money to boot.
But I’m still trying to figure out that “protecting property” thingy.
Have you ever listened to a weather forecast? They don’t tell you what is going to happen. Rather they tell you there is X% chance of something happening.
What they are really telling you is that when conditions in the past matched today, here is what happened in the past. This is not physical modelling, it is pattern recognition. You don’t even need to understand the physics of weather, all you need are accurate records and black box machine learning. Understanding the physics simply let’s you separate the inputs from the outputs in your black box.
Where climate and weather forecasting have gone wrong is to continues to try and solve a chaotic system from first principles even though it was shown mathematically that this is well beyond the capability of any known approach. And the finest minds in physics and mathematics have tried to solve the underlying problem for centuries.
But of course after spending billions on ever faster computers, it is hard to admit that you have blindly followed a mathematical dead end.
Ferd, I don’t think short term weather forecasts have gone wrong. They tell me what most likely will happen. Which direction the wind is going to be coming from, the strength of the winds, the moisture content of the air, whether there is a front coming and when. How high or low the temps will likely to be around, anticipated rain fall amounts, etc. We all understand things aren’t perfect and very local patterns can change. But for planning the next day or two it is pretty accurate.
Tom in Florida – February 9, 2019 at 3:10 pm
You are correct, Tom, …… and I believe that is what Ferdberple meant when he stated, to wit:
And a prima example of said is …. a weather map of the western Atlantic showing several potential “tracts” that an incoming hurricane will likely follow.
Ferd, you should find out how WX modelling is really being done, you’re well wide of the mark plus these are ‘free-floating’ physical simulations using present data-sample inputs. They’re not curve-fitting to the statistical past. The fact that such weather simulations can be so accurate, for days in advance, with low-ish resolutions of the data inputs (3 to 9 km on a side) should be a wake-up call. The resolution is getting steadily better as computer power and bandwidth grow, and so is the underlying simulation’s ‘skill’ at accurately projecting data forwards by several days.
I would readily agree that ‘climate simulations’ however are of no practical use, any more than satellites can measure actual climate-change as the scale is completely inappropriate for that and present ‘climate-data’ observation inputs are essentially completely absent for testing and developing them. Climate changes being much too slow to test in the ways humans want to test them. Without a time-machine that goes both forwards and then returns with a future log of all planetary climate changes, for say 100 million years in advance, climate simulations can not be developed and refined with any level of predictive confidence.
In short they’re artistic, not testable.
But in weather simulations the scale is very much exactly what you want, and the observational input data is epic in its variety, is near real-time, and is very high quality – all the things that climate model don’t have (and won’t be getting, hence, no predictive value).
But Milankovitch Cycles (and past stats) do not drive daily weather sim forecasts, and are not even a part of WX simulations, but Milankovitch cycles and past data are key inputs to climate simulations,
i.e. weather simulations and ‘climate simulations’ (I hesitate to call them that) are completely different beasts, even if they seem to use superficially similar approaches to deriving predictions.
The difference is all down to the time-scale of an actual climate change will never change quickly enough to model it in a predicatively useful and testable way.
In other words, climate modeling isn’t science.
WXcycles – exactly.
This is the Official Evaluation page for the FV3GFS
https://www.emc.ncep.noaa.gov/users/Alicia.Bentley/fv3gfs/
Here is a link to a pdf outline of the upcoming new FV3-based GFS forecast model
http://www.emc.ncep.noaa.gov/users/Alicia.Bentley/fv3gfs/updates/EMC_CCB_FV3GFS_9-24-18.pdf
Now, for all you arm-chair weather watchers that think you know everything about meteorology & demand perfection from an imperfect science with imperfect data sampling, the source code for all these models (GFS, NAM, HRRR, Hurricane, etc.) are all in the public domain for you to download, view & modify. So, get the code, correct & make it perfect, and show your results about how much smarter about this subject that you are. Till that time, you should really quit making fools of yourself.
There is a problem with your suggestion. How can you improve a climate model if you can not test it?
Of course you can test it, just like they test the other dynamic models. The atmosphere has been getting sampled in (reasonable) detail since the 1960’s (that’s almost 1 complete PDO/AMO oscillation period) and improving every decade but it is still part of that “imperfect data sampling” thing. You take a current model and the new model under test, initialize them with the same observation set of some previous date and run the models in parallel & see how they do with the result already known from newer observations. If the newer model modifications result in a match closer to the known observations, you can verify the modifications were helpful.
Basic stuff…
The current climate model approach, using black box machine learning to tune climate model parameters (back cast) is simply curve fitting. Any correlation found in the validation data is simply accidental. The model can be expected to diverge from future data with performance no better than chance.
Add to this will be bias caused either by data errors or errors in the underlying physics and the models can be expected to drift in addition to simple chance.
that’s not how tuning is done.
jeez
Then tell us how it is done.
Jeez.
Windows has alerted me to a critical update that requires a restart… be back soon ??
Hopefully your protection software blocked it.
That redirect/attack happens to me almost every time I come here.
Yup, ……. and it happens to my PC, …. 2 or 3 times per week.
Never happens if you use ubuntu!!
Yep, that was supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek joke, but almost the only time I get the “warning” is at WUWT. We must be over the target 🙂
I’ve never had Windows “break in” to what I was doing to alert me about an update, critical or not.
I’d run your antivirus program and/or run the actual Windows Update before restarting.
(Windows Update also has an option to show your update history.)
I recall Joseph Stalin’s comment that it is “Who counts the votes” that matters.
Just how many of the persons working on this new combination were appointed by Obama people during his two terms. The message will still be the same, or you will not get promoted.
We need a tough boss to ask questions such as “Prove it” or that other useful word “Why”
MJE
So, just more lies, distortions and horseshit?!?!? Got it!
So, more lies at my expense. Just f**king great.
Never happens if you use ubuntu!!
h/t Harald Lesch:
“Wenn Computer alles können dann können sie mich kreuzweise” –> when computers can everything then computers can kiss my back.
https://www.google.com/search?client=ms-android-samsung&q=g%C3%B6tz+von+berlichingen+er+m%C3%B6ge+mich+im+Arsche+lecken+englisch&spell=1&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjZzci25LLgAhXI-aQKHc0JCxQQBSgAegQICxAC&biw=360&bih=560
The times they are a changing. Not people.
Great! We’ll call this collaboration a circuit-jerk.