Forum for Science, Industry and Business

Precision weather service tells you exactly when it will rain

When planning a summer wedding, it does not really help to hear that "the probability of showers is increasing". A precision weather forecast will predict when the sun comes out or when the rain stops - or foretells if there is fog on the road or shipping lane.

Helsinki Testbed is a project designed to develop precision weather services. It consists of two parallel projects: a wide-ranging research project launched by the Finnish Meteorological Institute in 2005 that focuses on providing new weather services, and another project concentrating on the new observational systems developed by Vaisala Measurements Systems.

Precision weather data requires forecasting on a so-called mesoscale that in meteorological terms means a distance of 1 to 30 kilometres and time span of 0 to 3 hours. For this type of immediate forecasting the conventional observation networks and prediction models are too dispersed.

Eeva Ahola | alfa
Further information:
http://testbed.fmi.fi
http://www.tekes.fi

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