
WRF Official Repository – Weather Research and Forecasting - lemaudit
https://github.com/wrf-model/WRF
======
segfaultbuserr
I'm curious.

I believe national-wide weather forecasting by computers was been done since
the 1960s. As today's personal workstations are much more powerful than a
supercomputer built in the 1990s, and the _old_ models and numerical methods
(not the state-of-art ones) are well-known (and have multiple open-source
implementations), the calculation should be possible today on an ordinary
workstation for _educational purposes_.

But exactly what kind of data do I need to run my own weather forecast on my
computer? Is it possible to calculate my personal 12-hour weather report based
on public data published by NOAA, etc? Is there a tutorial for setting up a
weather forecast?

~~~
AllegedAlec
Disclaimer: not a meteorologist.

> But what kind of data do I need to run my own weather forecast on my
> computer?

I believe it's a combination of plain old measurements (wind direction +
speed, temperature, humidity, etc etc), RADAR, and a lot of historic
precedence. I don't know how much of that is open-sourced, but I think it'd be
easier to hook onto the api of your national weather broadcasting websites and
ask them what your weather will be for the next 12 hours.

~~~
angry_octet
Most of the data comes from satellite observation. The US does have a very
high density of RADAR as well. Sounding balloons and fixed weather stations
are the traditional inputs. There is no explicit historical data, though
arguably it is present in the use of particular schemes (weather speak for: we
tweaked these magic numbers in the model so it gave good forecasts).

You can easily run WRF with the NOAA GFS as initial conditions, it would
easily run on an iPhone computationally, but practically it will work on your
desktop Linux box.

[http://www2.mmm.ucar.edu/wrf/users/supports/tutorial.html](http://www2.mmm.ucar.edu/wrf/users/supports/tutorial.html)

They have a containerized version too, which will save much fiddling with
compilers and libraries.

[https://github.com/NCAR/container-wrf/](https://github.com/NCAR/container-
wrf/)

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fouc
WRF is a state-of-the-art atmospheric modeling system designed for both
meteorological research and numerical weather prediction. It offers a host of
options for atmospheric processes and can run on a variety of computing
platforms. WRF excels in a broad range of applications across scales ranging
from tens of meters to thousands of kilometers, including the following.

– Meteorological studies

– Real-time NWP

– Idealized simulations

– Data assimilation

– Earth system model coupling

– Model training and educational support

~~~
fouc
It doesn't seem to be a deeplearning/neural network model like I was half
expecting ;)

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fyfy18
Some other comments mention that European models are more advanced in some
respects. Are any of those open source?

~~~
andrew42
No, the European model (ECMWF IFS) is not open source, and they don't even
release most of the operational forecast data that they produce to the general
public. As far as I know the UK and others don't either.

