Читать книгу Weather For Dummies - John D. Cox - Страница 14

Weather science can be a complicated and difficult subject, so I figured Weather For Dummies ought to have its very own think tank. So, well … I made one up. It’s the Go Figure Academy of Sciences (GoFAS), and it’s all mine. It can be yours, too, if you want it. I took the best people I could find and put them to work in my own place.

It looks a little like the World Weather Building that the National Weather Service occupies outside of Washington, D.C. (see figure). It also looks a little like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, except my dome comes to a sharper point. Anyway, I think it looks pretty great!

Computer technology changed meteorology from top to bottom — nowhere more dramatically than in the field of weather forecasting. For the first time, with high-speed computer modelling of conditions in the atmosphere, forecasters had a way to quickly manipulate high volumes of in coming and out going data. No more puppets. No more song and dance. Everything depends on the quality of the models, of course, and since the 1950s, much of the time and money have been spent on computer hardware and software — making the models more sophisticated and sensitive to changes in the atmosphere.

Like the atmosphere itself, forecasting its behavior now is global in scope. National and private commercial forecasting services around the world maintain large, complex supercomputer simulations of the atmosphere and produce important global or regional forecasts. Two of the best known and most widely used are the global models produced by the U.S. National Weather Service (the Global Forecast System) and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (known as the European Model). Weather forecasting is a much bigger science and a bigger business than it used to be.