John Hearns wrote:
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)??
In the US, at least for academic institutions and hobbyists, surface and
upper air observations of the sort you describe are generally available
for incorporation into models for data assimilation. Models are
generally forced and bounded using model data from other atmospheric
models, also available. As I understand it from colleagues in Europe,
getting similar data over there is more problemmatical.
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/
Last summer, in Paris, I had a discussion on this subject with the
Ordinance Survey's chief cartographer. It is their intent to free the
data save reasonable costs of reproduction/maintenance as soon as they
can establish these. In the US, this is the norm. In Texas, where I
live, there's a site with State basemap data, highly accurate roadway
data, land-use/land-cover, census, etc. that's just an FTP call away,
or, if you want to pay roughly $10 per DVD, they'll burn a copy for you
(cost of personnel for reproduction of the DVD). Some states have
deemed their data proprietary. A lot have locked their data down
somewhat since 9/11, as our Department of Homeland Security has called
for restricting access to Critical Infrastructure data. Note that the
last listing of Critical Infrastructure for Texas listed some 268 pages
of delineation, description and justification. I fear it's been
updated/expanded since then. It included banks, cemeteries, schools,
bridges, water and sewer plants, shopping malls, high-traffic
motor-ways, refrigerated facilities, supermarkets, gas stations,
bridges, power transformer and generation sites, power transmission
lines, petroleum pipelines, and gas stations, to name a few. There was
discussion of adding individual residences to the list. As you can see,
restricting access to "critical infrastructure" could result in a blank map.
--
Gerry Creager -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Texas Mesonet -- AATLT, Texas A&M University
Cell: 979.229.5301 Office: 979.458.4020 FAX: 979.862.3983
Office: 1700 Research Parkway Ste 160, TAMU, College Station, TX 77843
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