The other week we had a big Metcheck day out visiting a Royal Show which had pretty much every type of animal you could wish for. Wandering around all the animal stalls we saw pigs, sheep, goats (some of them very hairy for goats!), cows, donkeys and what we thought was a super donkey! Now, we know donkeys can come in a few different sizes but this thing was *huge* and in our infinite wisdom we thought it was a donkey for when an adult asks for a ride.... turns out it was a horse... but that's beside the point.
One of the rather annoying things about weather models is that they change... frequently... and sometimes they have certain weaknesses (Ed. Err... like identifying equine animals?). The GFS had a rather impressive upgrade earlier this year, but the result is a global model which struggles with low cloud and also rainfall. The trouble is that pretty much every weather site which uses the data will also then display this inaccuracy, us included.
At Metcheck, we use a variety of models to come up with a human forecast for things like the discussions, front page articles and watches. We know that certain models are better than others for things like forecasting cloud cover, rainfall intensity or temperatures and we weight them accordingly before issuing the forecast.
This got us thinking.... Can we produce a hybrid weather model which takes the best from each of the major weather models and creates a forecast which reflects what is most likely to happen? Well, the answer was yes. Over the past few weeks we have been working on a brand new global model called GHX. This hybrid model blends the output from eight major weather models and then weights them accordingly based on their strengths and weaknesses.
GHX will replace GFS on all our forecasts later this month as it's that good, but keep tuned to the site as we will be releasing a preview of GHX as well as the graphics/charts from the model in the next few days.
FORECASTER : SUPERDONKEY
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