On Mon, Jan 19, 2004 at 06:56:41PM -0000 or so it is rumoured hereabouts,
Justin thought:
> Sounds like some interesting apps still plugging away with Fortran!
>> I was reading Perl for Biometrics there a while ago, really because it stuck
> me as interesting that one might choose Perl as the language of choice for
> DNA work. It would seem to me that a lot of work on DNA may be similar type
> of problem to Weather Prediction, searching for patterns in large sets of
> data, etc.. . Do guys in NWP use perl much? May be wrong of course since I
> know very little about Weather Prediction!!
Yup, dead wrong! :-)
NWP is completely gridpoint / cell based and does no pattern recognition
stuff. It works basically like this:
1. A known weather situation is encoded as gridpoint values (now)
2. At each gridpoint, thermodynamic equations are used to calculate
that gridpoint's status at the end of a small timestep (eg. 10
minutes)
3. Motion across cells is accounted for and each gridpoint is updated
4. This is now the new 'initial' weather situation and becomes the
starting point for another iteration from 2.
5. The process iterates until you reach the desired time.
NWP doesn't really know about weather (that's not strictly true since
'parametrisation' is used to model small scale features (like showers)
that the larger scale of the model would miss) but knows about
thermadynamics. The model itself doesn't care what it means and just
crunches numbers. Of course, it's all wrapped around with procedures to
turn the numbers into 'sensible' output.
Conor (rambling...)
PS. Our Peter Lynch is giving a 12 week series of lectures in UCD,
starting last week on NWP. I'm not sure if they're open to the public or
just available as part of a course though...
--
Conor Daly <conor.daly at oceanfree.net>
Domestic Sysadmin :-)
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