"weather" entries

Four short links: 2 February 2015

Four short links: 2 February 2015

Weather Forecasting, Better Topic Modelling, Cyberdefense, and Facebook Warriors

  1. Global Forecast System — National Weather Service open sources its weather forecasting software. Hope you have a supercomputer and all the data to make use of it …
  2. High-reproducibility and high-accuracy method for automated topic classificationLatent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) is the state of the art in topic modeling. Here, we perform a systematic theoretical and numerical analysis that demonstrates that current optimization techniques for LDA often yield results that are not accurate in inferring the most suitable model parameters. Adapting approaches from community detection in networks, we propose a new algorithm that displays high reproducibility and high accuracy and also has high computational efficiency. We apply it to a large set of documents in the English Wikipedia and reveal its hierarchical structure.
  3. Army Open Sources Cyberdefense Codegit push is the new “for immediate release”.
  4. British Army Creates Team of Facebook Warriors (The Guardian) — no matter how much I know the arguments for it, it still feels vile.
Four short links: 27 December 2012

Four short links: 27 December 2012

Industrial Control System Security, Geographic Pricing, Hacker Scouting, pressureNET Visualization

  1. Improving the Security Posture of Industrial Control Systems (NSA) — common-sense that owners of ICS should already be doing, but which (because it comes from the NSA) hopefully they’ll listen to. See also Wired article on NSA targeting domestic SCADA systems.
  2. Geographic Pricing Online (Wall Street) — Staples, Discover Financial Services, Rosetta Stone, and Home Depot offer discounts if you’re close to a competitor, higher prices otherwise. [U]sing geography as a pricing tool can also reinforce patterns that e-commerce had promised to erase: prices that are higher in areas with less competition, including rural or poor areas. It diminishes the Internet’s role as an equalizer.
  3. Hacker Scouting (NPR) — teaching kids to be safe and competent in the world of technology, just as traditional scouting teaches them to be safe and competent in the world of nature.
  4. pressureNET Data Visualization — open source barometric data-gathering software which runs on Android devices. Source is on GitHub.

A new look for weather data

WeatherSpark puts weather on display with full-screen maps and historical trends.

WeatherSpark co-founder Jacob Norda talks about making weather data — both real-time and historical — more accessible and intuitive.

New tools and techniques for applying climate data

A workshop shows early signs of climate scientists and data scientists coming together.

Climate cycles, machine learning and improved models were all part of the discussions at the first New York Academy of Sciences Workshop on Climate Informatics.

Interest in renewable energy could benefit data services

The need for temperature, wind, and solar analytics will likely increase.

The increase of large-scale infrastructure investments in the alternative energy sector will likely be accompanied by demand for data-driven services that can optimize efficiency of the related operational costs.

La Nina and global commodities

The connection between the La Nina phenomenon and food prices.

In the weather and climate community, 2010 will be remembered as a year where the strong La Nina pattern exerted a significant influence on global agricultural production.

Using the Standard Precipitation Index to monitor flood damage

The SPI can provide users with a quick and reliable way to assess damage from weather extremes

There is no shortage of news that attempts to discuss the potential for disruptions to the global food supply chain, as well as the subsequent financial and social effects of such disruptions on a global scale. Most of the news which garners the headlines in the agricultural commodity sector deals with topics including low physical inventories, floods, drought, food inflation,…

An ensemble approach to weather forecasting

A potential India-U.S. partnership could lead to better forecasting through collaboration.

A potential new partnership between U.S. agencies and the Indian Meteorological Department could could open up an "ensemble approach" to forecasting that encourages collaboration and breaks down proprietary barriers.

Growing new data streams

There's considerable promise in data sources targeting the global agricultural community.

High-quality and high-margin products will come to market that have their roots in agricultural data acquisition and repackaging.

Weather data and the supply chain

The predictive power of weather info, as illustrated by cows and La Niña.

A forecast — weather or otherwise — is always a blend of art and science. Nothing is foolproof. But in this post, Michael Ferrari shows how simple analysis can reveal a connection between a weather event (La Niña) and commodity production (milk).