Are thunderstorms predictable?
“The challenge we set ourselves to,” says Droegemeier, “was, if you take the concept of computer forecast technology and apply it at this smaller scale, does the atmosphere possess any intrinsic fundamental predictability, or is at all turbulence? We had hopes, but we didn’t know. With big help from the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, we resolved that question.” CAPS developed groundbreaking new techniques to gather atmospheric data from Doppler radar and to assimilate this data with other meteorological information. And they developed a computational model that uses this data to predict weather at thunderstorm scale. “It all starts with observations,” says Droegemeier, “because to predict we need to know what’s going on right now.” Data to feed weather models comes from many sources — upper air balloons, the national Doppler radar network, satellites, sensing systems on commercial airplanes. From these sources, a huge amount of information, computationally processed and spread acros
