Wow, this is the future.
I wish it was. I see no sign that forecasting has improved at all in my part of the world. Auckland, New Zealand.
This release is just for the SF bay area, their models for elsewhere are not released publicly yet.
300 meters resolution SF Bay Area Forecast
91–100 of 119 posts
Re: 300 meters resolution SF Bay Area Forecast
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
Coastal weather is often lacking the conditions that creates thunderstorms. I live near the coast now too and haven't experienced the kind of thunderstorm I know from Germany.
Depends on the coast I guess...NYC, for example, gets some real whopper summer thunderstorms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wk3Gz9o9yw4&t=12s
Have you been to the Midwest? I grew up near Cape Cod, and I have to say -- I'll take a nor'easter any day, give me the snow. That "maybe a tornado will just come down and demolish your house" type thunderstorm is pretty scary! I'm glad we've got a calm atmosphere up here.
Re: 300 meters resolution SF Bay Area Forecast
#93A 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…
I had been wondering if that was actually something special because I thought I remembered that the German Meteorological Service ("Deutscher Wetterdienst") offered accurate forecasts on a sub-kilometer grid for years already. At least if you are ready to spend money on that because that service is not free, so maybe that's the innovation here.
Where did you get the existence of sub-km (horizontal) grid forecasts from? Thus page https://www.dwd.de/EN/research/weatherforecasting/num_modell... contains the following sentence:
"The operational NWP models of DWD currently employ horizontal grid mesh widths between 2.8 and 13 km."
The convective cell tracking for nowcasting seems finer, IMO reasonable as it's about predicting watersheds down to <10km² area flash-flooding and causing the local creek to swell to actually dangerous levels/requiring partial evacuation of a valley.
Re: 300 meters resolution SF Bay Area Forecast
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
All fixed up and deployed.
<3 thank you for the quick fix! no unit switch yet right, or am I missing it?
Re: 300 meters resolution SF Bay Area Forecast
#95This 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 litt…
I feel like you could make a whole movie about the weather in LA. It would change your life. Twice.
Recognized the reference immediately. What a movie.
Re: 300 meters resolution SF Bay Area Forecast
#96What does "300 meters resolution" mean in this context?
Also note that it should be "300 meter resolution". You don't use a plural when using it as an adjective. I only point this out to help people because this is a common grammar mistake for non-native speakers.
Re: 300 meters resolution SF Bay Area Forecast
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hadn’t even thought of that until I read this. I had thought thunderstorms after hot weather were just a fact of life. I guess in places near German latitudes that get thunderstorms the hot weather is caused by high pressure systems but maybe that isn’t really the cause in California.
Coastal weather is often lacking the conditions that creates thunderstorms. I live near the coast now too and haven't experienced the kind of thunderstorm I know from Germany.
I guess maybe in North Europe where the climate doesn't vary much, but in the South, we do get thunderstorm and flood in coastal area.
https://www.euronews.com/green/2021/09/15/watch-as-more-floo...
Re: 300 meters resolution SF Bay Area Forecast
#98If 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 remember tinkering with WRF model in university using a single server. Depending on the resolution, generating forecast for the next day can take more than one day! Imagine getting forecast for tomorrow two days later! You do need quite a bit of computing resources and GPU if you want to use its forecasting feature meaningfully. In my case, I was interested in downscaling some historical data, so my limited compute was enough.
Re: 300 meters resolution SF Bay Area Forecast
#99Growing up in Germany, before I moved to the Bay Area, I was wondering why weather apps and widgets were so prolific. Sure, knowing the forecast for next weekend was nice, but for anything closer I'd just get out of bed and look out of the window. That would pretty much tell me what weather it is, and it would usually change just slowly over a few days or so. Then I moved to the Bay Area, and weather does not only ch…
Another anecdote: In the South of Germany at least, long stretches of sunny days are often followed by sudden thunderstorms with equally sudden bursts of rain. That "fact" had been so deeply ingrained in me that it was subconscious. You'd have a careful feeling if it was hot for too long, suddenly you might find yourself running for the next awning to escape the torrential rain. Sunny weather was a bit like building…
When I frequented Portola Valley, we called it six months of mud, six months of dust. Those golden hills are actually brown.
Re: 300 meters resolution SF Bay Area Forecast
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Few thoughts as a sailor in the SF Bay area. - Accuracy seems at least somewhat correct.That wedge shape you see in the late afternoon sailors call "the wind engine". Local sailing magazine Lattitude 38 has a special PDF that talks about doing a sailing trip around the bay accounting for this local wind phenomenon. Correct stuff: - The SF waterfront, out to the edge of the piers is mostly calm which is correct - Berk…
Also, as a person with experience sailing on the Bay, this model immediately seems unusually accurate. It shows, for example, the Angel Island wind shadow moving around correctly as it does during the day, which I have never seen in another model. Could anyone with more understanding of meteorology (or OP) please explain what is different about this model vs say the ECMWF model that you can see in apps like Windy, th…
It's purely spatial resolution and the representation of topography that high-resolution simulation permits. Any NWP model like WRF or WRF-LES will produce topographic-driven wind fields with high fidelity pretty much out of the box, without any customization required. The result may be pretty, but it's really nothing of note from a weather modeling perspective.
ECMWF's model is 9km spatial resolution, so Angel Island probably doesn't even show up in the model domain.