At the prompting of a Technology Review article today, I wanted to highlight this fascinating new high-resolution, four-dimensional weather service called Deep Thunder.

The brainchild of IBM's Research Division, Deep Thunder predicts rain, wind and temperature data down to a one-kilometer resolution. And while the project has been motion for over a decade, it is only now reaching a point where forecasts can be calculated every 30 minutes for several trial cities (including Miami, Kansas City, New York, and Baltimore). Eventually, IBM's supercomputers will be powerful enough to provide forecasts down to your neighborhood and street. By comparison, the National Weather Service can rarely provide resolution better than eight kilometers, which can be the difference in seeing the Brooklyn Bridge, for example, versus the island of Manhattan via satellite.

At a local submetropolitan level, the weather really can vary quite significantly, says Treinish. Yet typical forecasts will often slap a single simplistic symbol, such as the sun, a cloud, or a snowflake, on an area representing a small city.

The benefits to local municipalities and businesses would be the amount of precise data available to make decisions around weather conditions, such as deploying snow plows, managing a power outage, delivering the mail, and guiding airport traffic. Several classic scenarios (included in this series of animations) have provided accurate forecasts to major metropolitan areas in real-time:

• A northeaster in New York City this year dumped a record 26.9 inches of snow in Central Park; Deep Thunder's forecast came as an early warning the night before.


• Hurricane Wilma's track over Florida was recorded in high resolution, helping local and federal agencies to better plan their emergency response.


• High winds coming off the Atlantic and up into New York Harbor were first tracked a multiple scales at once in 2003, including 16, 4, and 1 kilometer resolutions.


• One of the first implementations helped the National Weather Service verify that it wasn't going to rain over Atlanta during the closing ceremonies at the 1996 Olympics.

The team of researchers at IBM's Watson Research Center in upstate New York has a long way to go before they can provide accurate forecasts at high resolution, but Deep Thunder marks a promising step towards a truly local forecast.

Thanks to Michael and Joannou for their help on this entry.