High-performance weather forecasts for the Special Olympics

Extreme weather experts are using a station perched atop a UBC building and high-performance computers to provide tailored forecasts for the Special Olympics Canada Summer Games, being hosted at UBC this week.

UBC researcher Roland Stull and his team are gathering the observations from equipment housed on the roof of UBC’s Earth Sciences Building, and then piping computer-generated forecasts directly to Games organizers via a secure web page.

Since 1996, Stull, a professor with Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, has been using his expertise and complex computer programs to make extremely accurate, high resolution weather forecasts for British Columbia.

Stull’s weather forecasts are more accurate than those available from a weather channel or website. To generate a forecast, Stull breaks the province up into a 3-D checkerboard-each square is 1.3 kilometers wide. These areas are smaller than the ones routinely used by Environment Canada and include very detailed information about BC’s coastal mountains. The result is a high-resolution forecast tailored for western Canada.

And while Stull’s Special Olympics forecasts are for the eyes of Games organizers only, in 2010 he and his lab started making broader, two- and 16-day forecasts available to the public.

Two-day observations and forecasts for the UBC campus: http://weather.eos.ubc.ca/wxfcst/users/Guest/custom.php

16-day forecasts for Greater Vancouver can be found at: http://weather.eos.ubc.ca/wxfcst/users/Guest/YVR_2-Week.php

Stull’s team provides weather research and forecasts to other users and industries in clean energy, transportation, weather-related hazards, and other special events.

Atmospheric Science undergraduate student Timothy Chui and research associate Rosie Howard developed the website, and two forecasters on Stull’s team, Greg West and Jesse Mason, augment the computer analysis.