Thanks for the links! GRAF certainly does look interesting...

That said, I'm not sure what would be wrong with IBM "capitalizing on their assets and monetizing weather forecasting". A company is going to act like a company; and why shouldn't it be rewarded for performing research and providing a service when the market is underserved?

Now, it would be a different thing if WCG and GRAF were directly connected, since WCG is meant to be charitable in nature, but I don't see anything that suggests a connection. ARP is run as part of Delft's research using CPU processing, and GRAF does not seem to be connected to any research project and runs on GPUs, suggesting a different algorithm.

Now, will GRAF eventually benefit from WCG's ARP research? Perhaps. But everyone else will be able to as well. One of the requirements for running a project on WCG is that the research results and data are open-source, so anyone else should be able to make the same improvements to their algorithm. Don't see why IBM should hold themselves to a different standard than anyone else...

It's a good question! I think you're probably right about the resolution. I remember crunching for climateprediction back in the day, and I thought the screensaver with all the colored squares was really interesting to watch. But I can only imagine how the resolution was on those old models. Probably several hundred or thousand square kilometers treated as a single data point.

Maybe previous models have been more "macro" models, and this is a more "micro" model? It's interesting how in a lot of sciences how different the models and equations are depending on the resolution of what you're studying. General & special relativity vs. quantum mechanics; microeconomics vs. macroeconomics; maybe there's something similar happening with weather. I'm interested to see what the results are, and if they turn out to be practical or basic research though! Exciting times

For those interested in the corporate capitalization of the weather, I would recommend:
"The Coming Storm" by Michael Lewis
https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Coming-Storm-A...p;ref=a_lib_c4_lProduct_0

I doubt that WCG type super computing will ever be used for short term weather prediction because of the limitations seen above. However, the IBM GRAF seems to rely, among other things, on wide spread cell phone input. This may work in India (which is the portion of the map shown in the announcement) but may not be practical in Africa. I do fear that ARP will be eclipsed in the same way that the discovery of the vaccine eclipsed the Ebola effort.