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It's 3 am and a fisherman needs to know what the weather will be like for Prince William Sound over the next 48-hour fishing window. Getting the weather from the National Weather Service (NWS) only gets him half the information he wants, and it's only right half the time. According to Peter Olsson of the Alaska Experimental Forecast Facility (AEFF), this is simply because the NWS modeling system uses very large-scale data, covering a block the size of PWS, so that weather forecasts for smaller areas within the Sound cannot be resolved accurately.
"They do an admirable job of [modeling] weather patterns, considering the challenges of the PWS area, but our project goes one step further," Olsson said. "We [model] a much smaller area with more detail and try to generate more accurate forecasts."
The PWS Observing System provides for many weather observations within a relatively small area. With over 20 weather stations reporting real time data within an area of 100 square km, PWS has one of the densest networks of observation platforms in the world. Using this data, the AEFF is creating a weather model of PWS that will be much more accurate than anything that has been created to date. Where the NWS now only has measurements for areas about 60 km2, the new buoys and measuring systems will allow for measurements of areas as small as 4 km2.
RAMS
"The finer resolution allows us to capture topographic effects that are not in the NWS simulations," Olsson said. The result are used as the basis for a Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (RAMS), a system for predicting the weather that is much more reliable than anyone has seen in the Sound.
To produce RAMS, the AEFF enters the data from the many different buoyed and land-based weather stations around PWS into a supercomputer made up of 13 smaller computers, all working together to create a mathematical model of the behavior of the Sound. Using this model, the AEFF can predict, with reasonable accuracy, the temperature, pressure, precipitation, winds, cloudiness, radiation, and many other elements of any area around the Sound. Using the data points, the mathematical model "fills in the gaps" between the measurement stations around the Sound, creating a complete picture of the Sound at any given moment.
The model also forecasts into the future, using archives of old data to predict what will happen up to 3 days in advance based on what is happening now. With this new technology in place, anyone venturing out into the Sound will soon have a much clearer picture as to what is going on today in any corner of PWS, and what is likely to happen tomorrow.
Data Access
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