Deep Thunder
Precision Forecasting for Weather-Sensitive Business Operations
Date Posted: September 25, 2006
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What is Deep Thunder?
Improving the effectiveness of a customer's weather-sensitive operations is not actually about the weather. Rather, it is about optimizing business processes such as resource allocation, scheduling, and routing, which are constrained by specific weather events. For example, local and state governments agencies need weather information for routine emergency planning for snow (removal, crew deployment), repair of downed power lines due to severe winds, and evacuation from areas of potential flooding. Customers want access to the forecasts in an on-demand fashion -- disseminated to them the way they want, when they want.
Deep Thunder is a service that provides local, high-resolution weather predictions customized to business applications for weather-sensitive operations one to two days ahead of time. In particular, the goal is to provide weather forecasts precisely and quickly enough to address specific business problems. Having detailed forecasts of the right caliber is a critical requirement for optimizing weather-sensitive operations.
Such forecasts can be used for a competitive advantage or for improving operational efficiency and safety. These uses have enormous potential for transforming reactive businesses into proactive ones in industries as diverse as road maintenance and operations, aviation, agriculture, broadcasting, energy, insurance, emergency management, and homeland security -- in all of which weather is an important factor in making effective business decisions.
How does it work? The system that provides the Deep Thunder service consists of a sophisticated infrastructure of hardware and software that is integrated and automated. The hardware includes a satellite receiver for access to weather data, System p for computing, and System x for dissemination. The software includes data processing, parallelized numerical weather prediction modeling, data analysis, and visualization. Each of these components can be tailored to meet specific customer needs. The results are typically provided through images and animations on a Web site. In addition, other types of dissemination can be enabled (such as text and e-mail warnings).
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| | About the technology author(s):
Lloyd A. Treinish is a research staff member in the Advanced Computing Technology Center of the Deep Computing Institute at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. He works on applications, user interfaces, and visualization, as well as systems that enable numerical weather predictions as part of the Deep Thunder project, which he heads. This project is focused on making practical and proactive use of mesoscale weather modeling for decision making in short-term, highly-localized, weather-sensitive business operations.
Mr. Treinish's earlier work at IBM Research focused on techniques, architecture, and applications of data visualization and methods of data management for a wide variety of disciplines. His research interests include visualization systems, visual design, data models, data fusion, and rule-based tools, as well as study of cartography and atmospheric and space physics phenomena. Mr. Treinish began his work at IBM Research in 1990. Earlier he did related work for over a decade at NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, as a senior computer scientist working on scientific data management and visualization as well as space and atmospheric sciences. He is a member of the IEEE Computer Society (IEEE-CS), the IEEE-CS Technical Committee on Computer Graphics, the IEEE-CS Visualization Conference Committee (program co-chairman of Visualization '95, '98, and ’99), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), ACM SIGGRAPH, the Planetary Society, and the American Geophysical Union (AGU).
Anthony Praino is a research engineer in the Advanced Computing Technology Center of the Deep Computing systems department at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. Mr. Praino began his work at IBM Research in 1983 in the Storage Instrumentation and Measurements department, where his focus was on hardware, software, and systems design and measurement for advanced disk storage. Since 2000, he has been a member of the Watson weather modeling group and Deep Thunder project, where his focus is on applications of environmental modeling, high-performance computing, and systems engineering. Mr. Praino is a member of the IEEE and the American Meteorological Society. He has been active in numerous aspects of the meteorological community since 1971.
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