On Mon, 2008-06-30 at 20:20 +0200, Toon Moene wrote: > > Since about a year, it's been clear to me that weather forecasting > (i.e., running a more or less sophisticated atmospheric model to provide > weather predictions) is going to be "mainstream" in the sense that every > business that needs such forecasts for its operations can simply run > them in-house.
Garbage in, garbage out. By that I mean that the CPU horsepower may be more and more readily affordable for businesses like that - let's say it is an ice-cream wholesaler who would like to have a three day forecast to allow stocking of their outlets with ice cream. However, the models depend on input from sensor networks - not my area of expertise, but I should imagine manned and unmanned weather stations, ocean buoys to measure wave height, satellite sensors. Do we see such data sources being made freely available, and in real time (ie not archived data sets)?? Hopefully on topic the Manchester Guardian newspaper (you all know me now for a Guardian reader) is running a "Free Our Data" campaign - to pressurise Government to make freely available GIS type data and census data which the Government has. I'm personally unconvinced of the overwhelming justification for (say) the Ordnance Survey to give all of its mapping data away for free. http://www.freeourdata.org.uk/ _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
