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Comment by chris_va | Hacker News Reader

For those technically inclined, look up Ekman transport. And if you rabbit hole far enough, you'll encounter one of the most awe inspiring units of measurement, the Sverdrup.

As an aside, Panama is a particularly sensitive point in climate models I've run.

(Disclosure that I manage a climate research group)

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How much more accurate a simulation could you run if you had OpenAI's training budget and supercomputer? (≈$100M)

what would you do with a more accurate simulation's data, besides have burned a great amount of money and (earth warming?) power to compute it?

As a fan of a sport that greatly relies on accurate weather forecasts with an interest in weather models my impression is that more supercomputer budget isn’t necessarily the issue (eg., more granular models can be less accurate) but the lack of data on the initial state is… Things like snow on mountains, soil conditions, vegetation, soil humidity and simply the problem of just having relatively few data-points makes stuff tricky… That stuff changes with season. I have seen some magic improvements coming from small shop companies tweaking the models here and there a bit - massively impressed. Now, running these simulations even further into the future - I have my doubt much useful prediction is gonna come out.

To your knowledge is there anybody working on a “littering the globe with huge quantity of cheap self-contained sensors” kind of project? Or is that the kind of work best done from the air or from orbit?

I am no authority to speak about this - but I believe expanding sensors and improving on data gathering is a continuous and on-going effort (e.g., weather station on ships, airplanes, stations deployed on sea etc.). Better weather satellites are also a thing. But then there is just so much more that could be done and all these data-points are still unevenly distributed (e.g., planes and ships follow routes). Weather models are improving quite a bit “behind the scenes” but again - I think we are far away from getting anything reliable for several days into the future; not to speak months or years.

Here is a nice interview highlighting a couple of improvements people are driving for a niche sport weather forecast: https://magazine.weglide.org/skysight-interview-matthew-scut...

Self taught climate junky here, so the Ekman Transport thing is a gem, which explains things I have seen inreal time watching huricanes leave there fingerprint right on the oceans surface

https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/products/ocean/sst/contour/index.h...

and will be watching for the Panama upwelling more carefully, but my eye has been drawn to the intersectiin of the labrador current and the gulf stream this year, which looks off a bit with the labrador erratic and the gulf stream tending a bit south. Also surface currents are exceptionaly visible in the artic sea ice, right now

https://nsidc.org/sea-ice-today

Does the group have anything online for the morbidly curious?

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