The new AI forecasts that will soon be available in OpenSnow are a first look at taking the foundation of existing numerical weather prediction and applying decades of historical weather relationships to more accurately predict precipitation in complex, mountain terrain.
Weather Forecast Models Today
The forecasts that have always been available in OpenSnow are a combination of public weather model data that we adjust to produce temperature, wind, and precipitation forecasts at specific elevations for any location, worldwide.
The data comes from a foundation of numerical weather prediction (NWP). This is a process of complex math and physics equations that take current weather observations and forecast the data days and weeks into the future.
NWP models such as the GFS (American) or ECMWF (European) currently take 6-12 hours to create the forecast on very expensive supercomputers that are built and maintained by governments around the world.
While this has worked to produce fantastic forecasts for the majority of the world over the past few decades, we're now entering a new age where we can use artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to produce cheaper, faster, and more efficient forecasts.
Weather Forecast Models Moving Forward
We are moving into a new era where the forecast data is trained on historical weather relationships to produce an infinitely detailed forecast for any location, worldwide, in a matter of seconds (not hours).
We're able to adjust low-resolution forecasts (from the GFS or ECMWF models) and make them behave more like high-resolution forecasts for any mountain location, worldwide, where we lack the real-time observations, historical analysis, or high-resolution forecast data.
Instead of using supercomputers from government agencies around the world, the data is now trained and built on computers that small weather companies like OpenSnow (we take pride in that!) can efficiently maintain and provide to you in an easy-to-use app.
This new downscaling technique and the AI-powered forecasts that they produce in OpenSnow provide us with a groundbreaker technology that we can all use to more accurately predict powder days, bluebird days, and everything in between.
Questions? Send an email to hello@opensnow.com and we'll respond within 24 hours.