TV maker Panasonic says it has developed the world’s best weather model

[knocker]

The company says it has beaten the GFS for a while and now equals the ECMWF.

For much of the 21st century, to the chagrin of US scientists and forecasters, the American GFS model—Global Forecasting System—has lagged behind the European ECMWF output, especially in things like five- and seven-day forecasts and tropical cyclone track forecasting. This is largely due to the fact that the ECMWF has typically had more dedicated supercomputers to run their forecast models and a much more sophisticated system to get more—and more timely—data into its forecast model as initial conditions.

A TV maker, really?

Large, multinational electronics company Panasonic now wants to crash the party. In an exclusive interview with Ars, Neil Jacobs, the chief scientist for Panasonic Weather Solutions, said the company has been running its own global model for several years on an 11,000-core supercomputer. And that PWS model, he said, has not only been outperforming the GFS model but has become competitive with the gold-standard ECMWF model. "We started the global model development in 2008 and finally got to the point where we were outperforming ECMWF by late last year," Jacobs said.

There are various ways to measure model accuracy, but one of the most widely recognized is "anomaly correlation" at the 500mb, or mid-level of the atmosphere, over a 30-day average. Higher scores are better. Recently, Jacobs said, the PWS model has scored a .926, compared to a .923 for the ECMWF and .908 for the GFS. Essentially, then, a team of five weather modelers and five software engineers, as well as about 20 meteorologists and computer modeling experts at universities under contract, claims to have beaten the best government weather forecasting centers in the world.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/04/tv-maker-panasonic-says-it-has-developed-the-worlds-best-weather-model/

[Yarmy]

Very interesting (and somewhat surprising). As a couple of people point out in the article though, I'll remain sceptical of the claimed verification stats until they submit their output for independent assessment.

I found a PDF presentation (sales-orientated, by the look of it):

ftp://ftp.panasonic.com/presentations/weather_solutions_presentation.pdf

Seemingly, it is the aircraft sensors that is giving them the claimed edge in data assimilation. 

[johnholmes]

well that should put the cat amongst the pigeons so to speak. I wonder what response both NOAA, ECMWF and UK Met will make to this?