
Show HN: Cloudrun – Numerical weather prediction in the cloud - milancurcic
https://cloudrun.co/
======
milancurcic
Cofounder of Cloudrun here.

Cloudrun is a SaaS platform for the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF)
model. WRF is by far the most widely used numerical weather prediction model,
but it currently requires access to supercomputers and domain expertise. Our
goal is to make custom weather prediction possible for those without access to
these resources.

This is our first MVP and we're working on making it more accessible for non-
modelers. We greatly appreciate any feedback on how to make this service
easier to use!

~~~
mino
This is _literally_ a cloud service :)

Bad joke aside: I'm curious, what is the "business" need and market/end-users?

Congrats and good luck Milan and Josh.

~~~
joshnoe
Thank you! We encourage bad jokes at Cloudrun. Our next project thedarkweb.edu
is a site for custom-made blackout curtains.

Our end-users are _currently_ mostly students and those working in academia.
For these gals and guys, it can be a PITA to use supercomputers to run weather
models. Milan can speak more to this.

However, the potential user is anyone who needs custom weather prediction.
Renewable energy, commodities trading, event planning (sports, concerts, etc.)
to name a few.

We're hearing about new potential industries all the time! Ideas are welcome!

~~~
dustinmr
Not sure if you envision getting down to a consumer level in some way, but I
race sailboats. There's plenty of people who use forecasting services to get a
forecast tailored to a very small area for their race course or route (think
10 sq miles).

I'd presume that mountain bikers, kayakers, climbers, and really anyone else
who is into sports that are dependent on weather may be interested in similar
information.

Delivering the information to a community like that seems like it would be too
niche for your service, but for the people that already offer services to
those people, perhaps there'd be interest.

~~~
milancurcic
Thank you for the feedback! At this point we don't target end consumers, but
rather small businesses that create these kind of products. However, we do get
a lot of requests for specialized and intuitive graphics/visualization and may
go further in that direction later this year.

~~~
mino
Naive question from a semi-beginner about your market: isn't there already a
lot of competition for hyperlocal forecast and good accessible visualizations
(e.g., darksky)?

~~~
milancurcic
Most existing services that I am aware of provide nice visualization of
existing publicly available datasets (GFS, NAM, HRRR, etc.). Cloudrun allows
the user to create their own forecast product/dataset, so it is mainly a power
tool and less a graphics/visualization service.

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lighttower
Adding creditcard is broken. Btw - some comments below are asking about use-
case and joking that physics grad students are happy. I'm looking for accurate
hyperlocal mountain weather forecasts generated with the latest possible data.
This is useful for avalanche prediction, planning expeditions, and trips in
general. I live in British Columbia btw.

~~~
milancurcic
Thank you for reporting the CC issue. We are looking into it.

Also, great to know about your use case! We have been looking into applying
this for snowfall prediction for ski resorts, but I wasn't thinking about
mountain expeditions in general.

What is the typical forecast time window that is important for your use case?
Is it < few days or out to a week?

~~~
lighttower
Currently we use SpotWx [0] for 12hr. It gives you the choice of whatever
numerical model you like. These are very important for mountain trips because
rain in the summer will make things very slippery etc. In the winter (ski-
touring), precipitation is not a big deal but avalanche hazard is -- so there
are avalanche forecasts [1] and [2]. You'll note that they breakdown the
forecast by elevation range, below treeline, treeline, and alpine.

The shortcomings of the existing systems is that it is cumbersome to get
elevation properly into the model. SpotWx for example, gives you the forecast
for the elevation of the square you clicked on, which is the average of the
surrounding elevation. This may be irrelevant if you're walking a ridge vs a
valley bottom.

SpotWx, however, does something very right, which is very good hourly
breakdown. The avalanche forecasts are typically for a very large area, and
the timing of precipitation isn't important, but heating due to temperature
change or sun is very important.

[0]
spotwx.com/products/grib_index.php?model=hrrr_wrfprsf&lat=49.25963&lon=-123.12047&tz=America/Vancouver

[1] [http://www.avalanche.ca/map](http://www.avalanche.ca/map)

[2] [https://www.nwac.us/mountain-weather-
forecast/current/](https://www.nwac.us/mountain-weather-forecast/current/)

~~~
milancurcic
Nice! The terrain issue that you mention is the limitation of the grid
resolution. For example, HRRR, the operational model used in the charts in
your link, has 3 km horizontal spacing. Individual peaks and slopes are poorly
resolved at that resolution.

We are already (internally) experimenting with 1 km and sub-1-km grid
resolutions using HRRR as initial and boundary conditions. Creating custom
forecast domains at fine resolutions is something that we are currently
developing and should be ready in the next 2-3 months.

Thank you very much for your input, it's super helpful!

~~~
lighttower
You've got my email address from the email I sent you regarding the
malfunctioning CC form. I've got a bunch of super eager UA-testers from BC
Mountaineering Club if you're interested.

~~~
milancurcic
Fantastic, thank you, I will follow up!

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gnufx
What's the advantage of this is over running, say, at Penguin scalably on
Infiniband nodes if you need the compute? (I wonder how weather researchers
work if they don't have access to HPC facilities, or why they don't take it
seriously enough to learn how to submit jobs if they do -- though that seems
to be a common syndrome these days.)

I don't know weather models; is there something about WRF that allows people
without domain knowledge to get sensible results? That's not the normal
experience with complex models -- sometimes even with people that are supposed
to be domain experts.

~~~
milancurcic
These are great questions!

> What's the advantage of this is over running, say, at Penguin scalably on
> Infiniband nodes if you need the compute?

POD gives you the nodes and a secure shell and you take it from there. In
contrast, we are building a SaaS, so the hardware and the configuration of the
model (from compiling the MPI libraries to running the model) are abstracted
away. The user provides input (files for now, parameters in the near future),
and gets output as a result. We scale in parallel also, but don't use Penguin
under the hood.

> I wonder how weather researchers work if they don't have access to HPC
> facilities

Many meteorologists only analyze existing model data, and not necessarily run
the models.

> is there something about WRF that allows people without domain knowledge to
> get sensible results?

Yes, in the sense that the output data represents 3-dimensional future
snapshots of the atmosphere. So you don't necessarily need to understand the
internals of the model (and definitely not the labor intensive setup) to
interpret the results. It really depends on what you're after. If you study
atmospheric dynamics, you're likely already a meteorologist. However an energy
trader knows how to interpret temperature, wind power, or insolation trends,
but does not need to know about how cloud microphysics are implemented
internally.

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ecqiu
Is there a guide on how to create runs for someone from a non weather
modelling background?

In particular for the input files, 'namelist.input' seems like a list of
parameters I could google for/tweak, but I'm not sure where I'd go about
sourcing data for the initial/boundary condition files 'wrfinput_d01' and
'wrfbdy_d01.

~~~
milancurcic
Unfortunately, at this early stage, Cloudrun still requires some level of WRF
expertise, needed to create these input files. We are working on automating
these steps so you don't have to, but it will take another 2 months or so.

In the meantime, you can email us at help@cloudrun.co, let us know your region
of interest and time window, and we will happily create the input files for
you.

We considered not launching the Beta before the input file creation was done,
but we wanted to get feedback as early as possible. I really appreciate your
interest and feedback!

If by any chance you decide to go creating these files yourself, the process
is tedious but well documented here:
[http://www2.mmm.ucar.edu/wrf/users/docs/user_guide_V3/users_...](http://www2.mmm.ucar.edu/wrf/users/docs/user_guide_V3/users_guide_chap3.htm)

We do plan to start writing short tutorials on setting up simulations and
geared toward non-experts.

~~~
ecqiu
Appreciate the link & response, happy to wait a few months.

I've been looking to find a way to get short term localised rainfall forecasts
in Australia (for sporting events) and excited to see how this goes!

~~~
joshnoe
Shoot us an empty email over to help@cloudrun.co. We'll send you some free
credit to get you started once this is ready!

------
d--b
A lost opportunity to call this CloudCloud!

~~~
joshnoe
Geez what a glaring oversight! We'd change it right now if not for the
hundreds of Cloudrun beer koozies we had made :(

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carterschonwald
for those who are curious, a teeny bit of googling reveals this to be a hosted
version of [https://github.com/NCAR/WRFV3](https://github.com/NCAR/WRFV3),
which is a super duper open source numerical computing code base (and the
license grant is roughly "this is public domain" but with more words).

i've always wanted to learn about weather simulation models so happy to
stumble into this domain

~~~
zitterbewegung
I think I was able to run WRF or a similar model on my laptop in 2010 (A
Macbook Pro with a Core 2 Duo). It took about a day to compile and run the
sample dataset. I gave a presentation about it at my weather forecasting
class. I almost got it running with our local sounding data but I ran out of
lab time I needed for the class. It was fun though I was reading reddit while
it was compiling and running. I was the only person to give a presentation
about it in my weather forecasting class.

~~~
milancurcic
Kudos for sticking through with it for your class project! I have been working
with and have contributed to WRF code since 2009, and it's sure not
straightforward. Porting it to different HPC systems can be especially
painful. This pain point was one of main motivators for building Cloudrun.

~~~
zitterbewegung
So, the class was actually structured so that you had to perform ~40 hours of
lab work. By using your software I could read reddit and perform lab work by
babysitting a compiler. So thank you for allowing me to use up all of that lab
time :)

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joshnoe
Credit card form is back up. Sorry to anyone who tried to sign up and couldn't
before!

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nategri
Somewhere, I assume, some atmospheric physics grad students are very happy.

