Wunderground launches BestForecast; Giovanna kills ten in Madagascar
Weather Underground's meteorologists have spent over five years developing and testing a powerful forecasting system called BestForecast, which has been used to provide all of our forecasts for non-U.S. locations for the past several years. After some final improvements made in the past year, the forecasts from BestForecast have become competitive with forecasts from the National Weather Service (NWS) over much of the U.S. As of today, BestForecast forecasts are the default on the site. What's cool about BestForecast is that we can make its forecasts specific for any site that collects weather data. We gather several years of weather data from a site and optimize the forecast to suit the unique microclimate of a particular station. Thus, "backyard meteorologists" that own and maintain one of the more than 22,000 personal weather stations that record and send live weather conditions to Weather Underground will now have a forecast specifically generated for their own backyard. BestForecast also gives the expected precipitation amounts (in inches), and provides ten days of forecast information, instead of the seven days provided by the National Weather Service.
Users can evaluate the reliability of these forecasts themselves and get a second opinion by switching back to the National Weather Service forecasts that were previously published. In some areas, the National Weather Service will out-perform BestForecast, so play around with using both, and see what works the best for your location. Web site visitors can switch between best forecast and NWS forecasts using the switch "BestForecast" ON|OFF at the top of the forecast page. To create transparency in our forecasts, wunderground.com will publish the recent accuracy of its temperature forecasts over the past 20 days for every location, alongside the accuracy of the NWS. The accuracy is given in terms of the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), in degrees Centigrade. A lower RMSE is better. The "MaxT" number is the verification of the daily high temperature forecasts, while the "Average" number is for the hour-by-hour forecasts.
A video demonstration of BestForecast is available on the wunderground.com About Our Data page.
Figure 1. Visible image from NASA's Terra satellite of Tropical Cyclone Giovanna over Madagascar, taken at 10:45 UTC Wednesday February 15, 2012. At the time, Giovanna was a tropical storm with 45 mph winds. Note the extensive plume of runoff and sediment stirred up by the storm flowing southwards along the east coast of Madagascar. Image credit: NASA.
Tropical Cyclone Giovanna kills ten in Madagascar
At least ten people were killed by Tropical Cyclone Giovanna in Madagascar, which hit the island nation as a powerful Category 3 storm with 125 - 130 mph winds at 22 UTC Monday night. An estimated 600,000 people lived in areas that received hurricane-force winds, but the eyewall of the storm missed the capital of Antananarivo, which received peak winds of 38 mph, gusting to 55 mph. Many remote areas that were affected by the storm have not been heard from yet, so the full extent of Giovanna's damage is not yet known. Giovanna is currently in the Mozambique Channel between Madagascar and Mozambique as a tropical storm with 50 mph winds, and is slowly intensifying. Latest computer model forecasts from the GFS and ECMWF models conflict, with the ECMWF model predicting the storm will swing around and pass very close to the southern tip of Madagascar next week, and the GFS model predicting landfall in Mozambique this weekend. Meanwhile, Madagascar must also keep an eye on Tropical Cyclone Thirteen, which is gathering strength over the waters to the east of the island, and is on a course that will bring it close to Madagascar next week.
Jeff Masters
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Health threat from cesium-137
By STEVEN STARRSENIOR SCIENTIST, PHYSICIANS FOR SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY
University of Missouri
Regarding the Feb. 14 article reprinted from Sentaku magazine, "Put children before politics": Thank you for endorsing this idea. I would like to comment on one aspect of the article regarding cesium-137, which makes up 40 percent of the long-lived radionuclides created by nuclear power plants.
Because cesium-137 has a 30-year half-life, the land seriously contaminated by the Fukushima disaster will remain dangerously radioactive for up to 300 years. There is a great deal of experience with cesium-137 in the seriously contaminated regions of Belarus and Ukraine. Once radioactive cesium makes its way into the soils, it will bioconcentrate and biomagnify in foodstuffs, particularly mushrooms, berries and wild game.
Food grown in these regions is contaminated with cesium-137, and sadly most of the children living there who eat this food have become unhealthy. The Belrad Institute, after nine years of research and hundreds of autopsies, found that cesium-137 concentrates in the vital organs, particularly the heart and endocrine system. Professor Yuri Bandazhevsky discovered that children contaminated with cesium-137 that produced 50 atomic disintegrations per second (becquerels) per kilogram of body weight caused irreversible heart damage in a child.
Source: Japan Times
Jiji: Experts warned today there’s high possibility of strong inland quake hitting Fukushima plant — Water 150km deep may seep into fault triggering massive tremor
Title: Inland Quake May Hit Fukushima Nuclear Plant: Study Warns Source: Jiji Press Date: 2012/02/15-23:26
There is a high possibility of a strong inland earthquake hitting the crippled nuclear power plant in Fukushima Prefecture, experts warned Wednesday. [...]
Water was found some 150 kilometers under the surfaces of the two faults, and the water, ascended from the Pacific slab because of underground pressure, is believed to have seeped into the Idosawa fault, triggering the massive Iwaki shake [...]
A similar event may happen in the Futaba fault, the researchers think.
Cross reference source:
Wall Street Journal, Study Predicts Increased Earthquake Activity Near Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant; Suggests Security Measures:
Link
They may not be filtering out outliers, or some are somehow slipping through which can really skew a forecast.
It's a new feature so there may still be some bugs.
Drove by Lake Travis this past weekend it still looks like this because they have received little to No rain since Sept. 2010 and just to the East around 30 miles water is standing, what a difference 30 to 50 miles can make.
Looking Good!
They need to add more scenarios.
yeah. but what they got is fun :D i like the severe weather across georgia scenario
Then you can do a bias analysis and correct for errors. A thousand "ok" data sources across a region will yield more accurate results than 1 "good" data source if handled correctly. If you know to expect a certain amount of error from the data coming in, and adjust accordingly you can improve over a single station, even if it that single station is in perfect working order.
There's no such things as perfect data. There are always missing, corrupt, and/or wacked out data even from the best data sources. Before forecasters even touch the data, it is processed, error-corrected, and packaged into a form that's actually usable either via analysis tools or models.
Typically forecasters and operational model runs use what's known as level 3 data. This data is adjusted, error, corrected, and interpolated onto a regular grid (otherwise models like GFS would explode). In most cases, you could pop the data into something like Panoply or GrADS and it wouldn't look like distorted garbage. Raw data is considered level 1, and if you don't know where it came from or what you're doing then it's little more than bit mush. Any model I'm aware of would puke ASCII and die if you tried to feed it level 1 data.
Nobody told you to stay in boring Louisiana.
Posted on February 15, 2012
February 15, 2012 – ROME – Heavy snow in recent weeks has already wreaked havoc across Europe — now it is damaging some of the continent’s most recognized historic monuments. The Colosseum in Rome has been forced to shut after small pieces of its walls crumbled away as a result of freezing temperatures. And buildings in the historic walled town of Urbino — a UNESCO World Heritage Site — are reported to be at risk of collapse under the weight of snow, following unprecedented blizzards in the area. In the Italian capital, thousands of tourists have been disappointed to discover the Colosseum, one of the city’s most popular attractions, is closed to visitors, while checks are carried out to determine the extent of the damage and to help prevent further movement. Cristiano Brughitta, spokesman for Italy’s Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities, said the damage was caused by ice forming on the walls of the monument. David Pickles, senior architect at English Heritage, told CNN such damage was an extreme version of the natural wear and tear buildings face during everyday weather. “There’s a whole freeze/thaw cycle of damage to buildings where moisture gets into the stonework, into the pores of the stone, it then freezes and expands very significantly, it then breaks up the stone and then when it thaws, bits of stone will start falling off. “That’s happening all the time, of course, that’s one of the major decay mechanisms in historic buildings anyway, because they’re largely water permeable… You can’t treat stone to stop it happening.” -CNN
Wednesday, 15 February 2012 15:37
As reported the Geophysical Service of Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences- two unusually powerful explosions occurred in the last few days in the south of Western Siberia, a few dozen kilometers of the town of Belovo, Kemerovo Region, Russia. The first explosion took place February 9, 2012 at 20:30 pm, the explosion was such a huge force, that the inhabitants of cities Belovo Prokopevsk, Novokuznetsk, Kemerovo felt such powerful tremors of the earth, which in many apartments the furniture were falling, many residents were in the panic, ran into the street, thinking that this is an earthquake, but according to the Geophysical Service of Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences, that have been published already after a few minutes after these shocks- Russian Academy of Sciences excluded the possibility of an earthquake, as an explosion occurred on the surface of the earth, the force was M3.6 on the Richter scale. After this - at February 12, 2012 was another explosion, a little weaker, than the previous explosion, and the Geophysical Service of the Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences also noted, that it was an explosion but was not an earthquake and this explosion occurred exactly at the same place (the copy of the report message of Geophysical Service of Siberian Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences can be viewed at the top of this article). All the local press of the Kemerovo region for several days discussed these strange explosions, for first- these explosions can not be explained by the extraction of minerals, since the extraction of minerals in Russia at night time is strictly prohibited, and secondly, the explosions were so much force, that they were equivalent to an explosion of several thousand tons of explosives, and so much explosives do not have the local companies, that extract minerals in this region. Therefore, put forward suggestions, that it were the explosions like of the Tunguska explosion of 1908 or it were the testing of new models of tectonic weapons. Two days ago the specialists of Russian Academy of Sciences from Moscow arrived in Kemerovo, now in the area of explosions are prohibited the access of local residents.
I stay because of the hurricanes.
What about Texas? Alabama? Mississippi? Florida? South Carolina? North Carolina?
Silly Kori, more than one state gets hit by hurricanes.
Judging by admittedly incomplete research I've done on Louisiana hurricane history, it appears that the state is among the top five in the US to witness annual hurricane strikes.
Though I suppose Florida is always an option.
ETA: Or Guam. That island is probably built to withstand typhoons anyway, so what do I have to lose?
It's amazing how cold they are and how warm we are.
Uhm...Then you wouldn't get Severe Weather.
I'd say Alabama is your best bet. :)
Hurricanes produce severe weather.
NWS HYDROMETEOROLOGICAL PREDICTION CENTER CAMP SPRINGS MD
123 PM EST WED FEB 15 2012
VALID FEB 15/1200 UTC THRU FEB 19/0000 UTC
THE GFS APPEARS TO HAVE WORSE INITIALIZATION OF THE TROUGH'S
PLACEMENT OVER BRITISH COLUMBIA AND NUNAVUT THIS MORNING COMPARED
TO THE NAM/ECMWF. MEANWHILE...THE GFS IS MOST AGGRESSIVE IN
ALLOWING AN UPSTREAM PERTURBATION CURRENTLY OVER THE PACIFIC TO
CUT THROUGH THE SHORTWAVE RIDGE OVER THE CANADIAN ROCKIES ON
THURSDAY...WHICH THEN PHASES WITH THE NORTHERN STREAM AND SLOWS
THE ENTIRE GFS SOLUTION. THE COMBINATION OF WORSE INITIALIZATION
AND QUESTIONABLE AND EVEN SUSPICIOUS PHASING OF THE SEPARATE
STREAMS IS SUFFICIENT TO DISCARD THE GFS PARTICULARLY LATE IN THE
PERIOD.
Link
That's all well and good.... except that 150km deep is about 75km inside the friggin mantle. Kinda doubt water can exist there. Not to mention... pretty sure all plate tectonics exist solely on the earths crust... you know, the part that floats on top of the mantle? Just sayin.
Is that just for the 12z?
I should have put a smiley after that.
The optimist considers a realist a pessimist
A pessimist considers a realist a optimist
The still warrants a smiley, but it also has a lot of truth in it.
Quoting WxGeekVA: good graphic, you pessimist. :)
I'm talking about non-tropical severe weather, as were you. Not sure why you changed to hurricane-related severe weather. :P
I should have just generalized from the start and said I like extreme weather.
It is but the 18Z discussion won't load right. It says similar things though...
Ever consider the Diplomatic Corps, Kori?
I'll see your hour 75 and raise you hour 81 and a Southern VA blizzard...
Already have 84 up ;)
DC snowstorm 0Z NAM FINALLY!!!!!!!!!
Come on moisture, come on moisture, stay in Southeastern North Carolina and let the blue line come through. :(
It doesn't even have to accumulate that much, I just want to see it fall!
It looks like the NAM wants it to after 84 hour mark, we will have to wait till the 12z tomorrow though. It wants too.
Yes.
No.
Maybe.
Possibly.
Probably Not.
Maybe someday.
Tomorrow.
The Day After Tomorrow...
What if I like trouble?
*whistles innocently*
The day after the day after tomorrow.
so yesterday?
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