Ask HN: Interesting papers on weather prediction?

#1

Post by cb372 » Tue, May 24, 2011, 11:28 AM UTC

The other day I was watching the weather forecast on TV, and started wondering exactly what kind of algorithms those meteorological boffins are running on their supercomputers to predict whether or not it will rain tomorrow.

Can anyone suggest some good papers to serve as a technical introduction to information processing/algorithms for weather prediction?

(Target audience: I'm a professional software developer with a working knowledge of data mining and related fields, and a barely-remembered knowledge of high school physics.)

Re: Ask HN: Interesting papers on weather prediction?

#2

Post by polyfractal » Tue, May 24, 2011, 2:12 PM UTC

Not a technical journal per se, but this site looks* like an impressive resource:

http://www.theweatherprediction.com/

*I know nothing about weather prediction

Re: Ask HN: Interesting papers on weather prediction?

#3

Post by gsivil » Tue, May 24, 2011, 5:29 PM UTC

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenz_attractor

Lorenz, E. N. (1963). "Deterministic nonperiodic flow". J. Atmos. Sci. 20 (2): 130–141

One of the papers that are related with weather as a chaotic phenomenon

Re: Ask HN: Interesting papers on weather prediction?

#4

Post by mturmon » Thu, May 26, 2011, 8:53 PM UTC

You might want to start with:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_weather_prediction

You say you want "some good papers", but I think you need a book, not an article or articles.

It's a big field, very broad, very well-developed, and quite technical on many levels (physical modeling, numerical propagation of PDEs, filtering/data assimilation). An international cast has contributed results and ideas for decades.

You might be able to find a survey article, but such an article would tend to be written for specialists. It tends to look like this:

http://people.sc.fsu.edu/~inavon/pubs/Springer_book.pdf [PDF]

The current state of the art in NWP is probably the ECMWF:

http://www.ecmwf.int/

Re: Ask HN: Interesting papers on weather prediction?

#5

Post by cb372 » Fri, May 27, 2011, 5:44 AM UTC

mturmon wrote: post #4

You might want to start with: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_weather_prediction You say you want "some good papers", but I think you need a book, not an article or articles. It's a big field, very broad, very well-developed, and quite technical on many levels (physical modeling, numerical propagation of PDEs, filtering/data assimilation). An international cast has contributed results and ideas for decades. Yo…

Thank you, especially for telling me the name of the field that I am looking for!

I think you're right in saying that a proper book is in order.