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Comment by sigmar | Hacker News Reader

The GFS model has been embarrassingly bad in comparison to Europe's ECMWF models. Here's to hoping it will be more competitive in 2019.

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The GFS though is the best public domain model in the world. ECMWF is proprietary, both code and model outputs, and the raw data are only accessible through paid agreements.

There is a crippled version of IFS (the ECMWF forecast model) which has the data assimilation code removed available [0], thought its licence terms are pretty restrictive for most uses [1] besides pure research (it is, for example, forbidden to use it for personal uses!).

[0] https://software.ecmwf.int/wiki/display/OIFS/ [1] https://software.ecmwf.int/wiki/display/OIFS/OpenIFS+Licensi...

I've been trying to figure out api access to forecasting data from ECMWF

Do you happen to know if wind speed forecasting data requires a commercial license? Seems like the free api key only gives you access to historical data?

It will be interesting to see what happens with weather modeling with the new Panasonic model. Although getting any info about it at all has been incredibly difficult since its all private.

Panasonic has released some data on how theirs compared to others for Hurricane Irma last year. Here's an article about that: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/...

It says that Panasonic posted the data from this online so scholars could evaluate it, and gives a Google drive link, but that's 404 now.

Has there been a rash of failures? Not a meteorologist, but I usually hear that ECMWF & GFS have generally been trading blows, and have different strengths.

there are a few high profile cases where the Euro predicted hurricane paths better then the GFS. Granted these hurricanes are HUGE events and better hurricane forecasts saves lives etc. However these models predict ALL the weather, all the time, not just hurricanes. We use the GFS (in combination with other models as well) to shape our forecasts every day for all kinds of weather and millions across the country rely on these data.

The guy reading you a forecast on news channel ? If they are providing a forecast for greater than 3 days in the future, you bet they are including the GFS info in their predictions!

embarrassingly bad according to what? At my work we use the GFS data and our customers are extremely pleased with the data we provide.

The GFS was bad at tropical weather this year. Though I have to say, the GFS has been a little less crazy in long term forecasts on the US West Coast lately.

Not sure how much processing power will improve the tropical storm forecasts, though. I had the impression that had to do more with the model's physics. Though it would be nice to catch up with the ECMWF's data assimilation prowess, that would definitely help.

The euro has outperformed the gfs and the canadian on statistical skill scores for a few years now.

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