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300 meters resolution SF Bay Area Forecast

sf.atmo.ai

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Re: 300 meters resolution SF Bay Area Forecast

#31

Post by lbrindze »

samvher wrote: post #18
Waterluvian wrote: post #12

A few thoughts from a geographer (be prepared to shoot me): - Basically every comment is wowed by this, but nobody questions what the accuracy is. I, too, can Krig interpolated surfaces to any resolution. - off-nadir view doesn't seem to offer much - We've been dealing with janky tile loading for like 20 years now. I really hope we'll get a much smoother approach for viewing these tiles as they load. The dissolve tra…

This seems to be a thing with weather models more generally. Somewhat relatedly, I've spent quite a bit of time evaluating weather models for use in India and Africa, and while predictions are easy to find, validation results for the predictions are very hard to find. And when you do find them, the results are pretty poor, with many models performing worse than if you would say "predict temperature on date X to be th…

Given this is in the SF bay there a number of high quality observations that you can use to validate the forecast skill (unlike India and Africa). I have not bothered doing this here since… well that’s too much like my day job.

I’m always excited to see new forecast products, generally. If I were to guess (as an above comment did) it looks like they are applying some dynamic downscaling on top of either a custom WRF model (expensive and complicated) or more likely already available weather model data like the HRRR, which still would represent a 10x resolution increase.

I’m more curious what the refresh rate is. Anyone can get a super accurate forecast for the next 3 hours that takes 10 hours to run, but at that point it’s no longer a forecast by the time the data is available.

I still think that windy has set the standards as far as modern weather visualization goes. Not saying everything has to be particles but other things (like the inclusion of isobars) is really clean and not trivial to execute.

Either way this has definitely piqued my interests and I will be keeping an eye on it, their advisory board looks legit (at least in the meteorology end)

Re: 300 meters resolution SF Bay Area Forecast

#33

Post by pklausler »

bombela wrote: post #15

How do you switch to normal (for 97% of humans) units for temperature and wind?

I learned to interpret wind speeds in m/s on a visit to Iceland and found it to be an intuitive unit for hiking and other outdoor purposes. And 1m/s is pretty close to 2 knots so it's easy to convert.

Re: 300 meters resolution SF Bay Area Forecast

#34

Post by asdff »

This needs to be done for more cities in California, especially Los Angeles with its huge geographic area and all the diverse micro climates contained within. Sometimes the weather changes more than 15 degrees in half as many miles from the coast. It therefore doesn't make sense to e.g. check "weather in LA" when its going to be somewhat wrong most of the time depending on where in LA you happen to be, since the little widget that pops up on google search for "weather in LA" doesn't exactly tell you where in the 500sq miles of LA they are putting the temperature probe.

Re: 300 meters resolution SF Bay Area Forecast

#35

Post by mturmon »

lbrindze wrote: post #31
samvher wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be a thing with weather models more generally. Somewhat relatedly, I've spent quite a bit of time evaluating weather models for use in India and Africa, and while predictions are easy to find, validation results for the predictions are very hard to find. And when you do find them, the results are pretty poor, with many models performing worse than if you would say "predict temperature on date X to be th…

Given this is in the SF bay there a number of high quality observations that you can use to validate the forecast skill (unlike India and Africa). I have not bothered doing this here since… well that’s too much like my day job. I’m always excited to see new forecast products, generally. If I were to guess (as an above comment did) it looks like they are applying some dynamic downscaling on top of either a custom WRF…

The website claims to be using DL which may mean less of a model-centric approach? The expertise of the people at the top of the organization, on this problem, seems a little thin, TBH. And, no stated validation results at all? Without such details, this is just marketing.

It would be interesting to see how this behaves for longer prediction times and across a range of difficult forcing conditions off the ocean in the BA.

Re: 300 meters resolution SF Bay Area Forecast

#38

Post by RosanaAnaDana »

lispisok wrote: post #27

If I had to guess they are running the WRF model [1][2]. The AI part is post-processing the model output. With a fair amount of reading the manual anybody can run their own WRF. WRF scales from running on a laptop to supercomputers with 1000s of cores. [1] https://www.mmm.ucar.edu/models/wrf [2] https://github.com/wrf-model/WRF

I mean up or downsampling is trivial. The question isn't if you can make a raster at any resolution, its if you can make a raster thats accurate and precise at that resolution.

Its not clear to me that this is either.

Re: 300 meters resolution SF Bay Area Forecast

#39

Post by thot_experiment »

johmathe wrote: post #23
wmeredith wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for chiming in. I can make an animation say whatever I want. I am very curious about the accuracy. Unrelated: The site breaks my back button in Chrome, which is an unforgivable UI sin.

Thanks for the feedback. We will have the back button fixed quickly :)

Same thing in firefox, and pleeease have a units switch. Would be infinitely more useful if I could view the site in the units my brain normally works in rather than having to think about the conversion all the time. Very cool site otherwise, also very cool bay area right now.
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