ericinmia wrote:What about the Air Force MM5.... I'm not sure what resolution that on is run at.
For how important these things are... why can't we devote more copmuting power/resources to them. Coming from the IT field, this is very easily feesible. With the proper grants.
-Eric
Derek, if you know, please correct me, but the way I read this,
https://afweather.afwa.af.mil/observer/ ... _____.html
the AF version that we are familiar with is run at 15 km resolution.
As for the second part of your post... I am not sure what the purpose of the model is. I doubt it is being used as a 'word of God' forecast tool. In fact, I wonder to some degree, if it is a toy (hesitate to use the word toy in conjuction with a forecast model, but still) for Dr Hart and/or one or more of his grad students. It could be also some sort of trial test or something, nothing near a final work, I don't know.
From what my uncle (who is CTO of Virginia Tech) said to me, it doesn't sound like FSU's computing division gets that much money... so much of it gets spent on mundane stuff like general purpose computer labs. He brought it up in the context of talking to FSU's CTO about how VT had the money for their supercomputer. Part of the reason was that VT requires every student to have a computer of their own. Because of that they don't have nearly the number of general purpose computers (and supporting staff) that FSU has. From what he said, FSU was going down the same road as VT did.
I may have misread it, but I seem to remember reading something that implied that the computing resources for the Superensemble are somehwere other than FSU.
As we don't know what the exact purpose of it, we can't say that it is underpowered, though if it is supposed to be a complete serious tool then that is the case and that is why it is run at a low resolution.
LATER
This
http://alpha.lasalle.edu/~didio/courses ... asting.htm
suggests that while it was run on UCAR resources at one time, that the superensemble is now run on a supercomputer belonging to FSU.