Intergration of The Weather Channel?

  • As far as I have read The Weather Channel/Company uses IBM Watson to forecast. Are there any plans to include this model in Windy? It is said to be the most accurate model available.

  • If I might offer an opinion on that subject...

    The weather company was acquired by IBM in 2016, with some pretty cool plans to create a super-high-resolution global model. Know as the "GRAF" model, they've managed to achieve a resolution of around 3 km in many parts of the world, using GPUs and other crafty techniques. They assimilate tons of data from the Internet of Things (I think they even use smartphone data).

    There's a lot of hype, and yes, if they deliver what they promise it'll be really fascinating. However, with any numerical weather prediction model, I can't understate the importance of waiting to see how it performs! Just look at the successor of the GFS, the FV3. NOAA couldn't even get it to outperform the GFS during testing (hopefully it's doing better now). And it sounds amazing to include so much observational data, but actually there's not a huge amount of research when it comes to data assimilation from the Internet of Things. Non-standard observations can create a lot of garbage, and as we say in NWP – garbage in, garbage out.

    Also, bear in mind that even though GRAF is very high resolution, its lead time is really short, something like 48 hours (can't remember the exact number). So it still can't compete with ECMWF in terms of the medium range. And finally, the data is highly unlikely to be free, if available at all outside of Weather Channel applications and media.

    If anyone else knows anything beyond the obvious about GRAF (or more generally, IBM's Deep Thunder project), please do share! Googling the subject leads to endless articles with nothing more than info from IBM's press releases... :)

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