The professionals have a fair amount of observation and prediction and
they manage to get it wrong at least half the time, Sandy. In my
view, and Frank vL might or might not agree with me, there is far too
much reliance on automatic prediction and automated observation. We
need 2 things: weather stations out to sea where we can't at the
moment see much of what is happening; and people to observe and
predict. When I had a team of met men, observers and forecasters,
working for me at RAF Brüggen, there were moves afoot to reduce the
number of observers and the quality of the forecast deteriorated
accordingly. And if the forecaster has little experience of the
region his forecasts will be pretty useless a lot of the time. I fly
from RAF Wyton, but the forecaster is at RAF Wittering (to save
money); the forecasts are wrong at least half of the time, partly
because of the forecaster's distance from the airfield, partly because
he has to go along with the Met Office's model for that day or week.
It has all gone to pot, I tell you ... mumble, mumble, grump! :-)
Chris
On 11 Dec 2007, at 12:21, Sandy Harris wrote:
> Would sheer numbers help much? There's a lot of connectivity
> options these days. If someone came up with a really cheap
> basic instrument pack and deployed thousands of them (maybe
> one on every farm?) with communications to some central
> computer, would prediction get any better?
>
> You don't need much bandwidth. Temperature over a 200
> degree range with 1/10 degree accuracy takes 11 bits
> A 128-bit packet would likely do everything you could
> possibly want; an ordinary phone line or cell phone
> connection can handle 512 of those a second.
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