Hurricane Ike
My parents’ electricity went out. Apparently there was a hurricane in Ohio?!?!
Yes, of course, it was Hurricane Ike. I have a new favorite storm tracking site: The University of Dundee’s StormPulse. At one point, I was warning my Texas friend that it would strike Brownsville. I guess we still haven’t quite cracked the problem of weather prediction. And, I guess that’s what makes it so fascinating to me.
Because my parents live in central Ohio, the storm passed to the west of them. They got all wind and no rain. If you look at a good surface chart, you can visualize cogs turning - Here in the Northern Hemisphere it’s Clockwise H and Counterclockwise L. In between a H/L pair, you know which direction wind is blowing. Over the United States, these patterns are all basically moving West to East, so you can usually reckon how the map will look in the next day or two.
I find the hurricane prediction tracks are very helpful in visualizing how the whole chart will evolve over the course of the next few days. The size of a High or a Low is related to the strength, with the bigger, stronger systems pushing the weaker ones out of the way. Warm ocean water produces and sustains the hurricane, giving it size and power to weigh in against neighboring systems. Over land they tend to wind down and get pushed around.
I wonder if there is any provision for training the models to account for their past performance. Neural networks or Genetic programming sound crazy, but the parameters of these software models are just an educated guess to begin with - wouldn’t it be nice to let the models discover their own strengths and adjust their own parameters? This is part of what I wanted to talk about yesterday: The best predictions from a supercomputer probably come form models we can’t rightly explain, where the machine adapts to match the patterns it encounters. We certainly have lots of training data now, with new predictions every few hours and all the actual environmental data collected at that predicted time.
Posted by Evan Bittner Mon, 15 Sep 2008 20:07:00 GMT
