TPT January 2016

Global Marketplace

In brief . . . › Benteler Steel/Tube has announced the start of operations at its tube rolling mill at the Port of Caddo-Bossier in Louisiana, USA, with an initial workforce of 350. As reported by WorldNow (4 September), this marks the completion of Phase I of a project that will eventually employ 675 workers. The location, on the Red River Waterway just south of Shreveport, offers ready access to barge, rail, motor freight and air transport. For Benteler, which makes seamless hot-rolled steel tubes and seamless cold-drawn precision steel tubes, the $975 million project is the first of its kind outside Germany. In November 2014 – on the campus of neighbouring Bossier Parish Community College – the company opened the Center for Advanced Manufacturing and Engineering Technology, a $21 million, 65,000ft 2 manufacturing training facility. Duelling weather models Having invested heavily in computing power, Europe outshines the US in storm forecasting “Maybe it will be Joaquin’s false alarm, not another Hurricane Sandy, that gets America to make the GFS great again.” The Joaquin referenced by Nate Cohn of the New York Times was a 2015 hurricane that fizzled out; Sandy was a 2012 hurricane that, famously, did not. The GFS is the Global Forecast System, which is run by the US National Weather Service. Mr Cohn has serious reservations about its effectiveness. Writing in the watch-and-wait period that is a feature of every Caribbean storm system, the Times ’s “Upshot” blogger called his shots. Hurricane Joaquin would yield one clear winner: the model from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) – or simply, the European model – which consistently forecast that Joaquin would head off to sea. It did, avoiding the direct hit from which, post-Sandy, the East Coast of the US has not yet fully recovered. The ECMWF forecast this time – the mirror image of what happened with Hurricane Sandy – would not mark the first instance of Europeans leading the pack. In 2015, the US model and others called for Joaquin to turn left. The European model dissented. Wrote Mr Cohn, “It’s a familiar story for meteorologists who have been calling for vast and attainable improvements in American weather forecasting for years.” (“Hurricane Joaquin

Forecast: Why US Weather Model Has Fallen Behind,” 2 October)  In early 2013, the European model had nearly ten times the raw computing capacity of the GFS. Mr Cohn noted the “obvious and irrefutable” cumulative effect of this and other problems with the GFS: the inferiority of the American system was playing out in high-profile cases. After Hurricane Sandy, Congress gave the National Weather Service the money for more powerful computers. In January 2015 the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that it had increased computing capacity and begun running an upgraded model with higher resolution. The improved system in fact scored an early victory in the matter of a blizzard that largely bypassed New York City. But in the view of experts the upgraded GFS remains second-rate or worse. “The GFS is still quite inferior” to European and British models, Cliff Mass, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington, told the Times . S teady data collection vs ‘ snapshots ’ Additional upgrades – which will yield a nearly tenfold increase in computing capacity – will help, but not enough. According to Mr Mass the problems of the GFS run deeper, all the way down to the description and modelling of the basic physics of radiation, clouds, precipitation and turbulence. Data assimilation is the process of taking all available data and building an initial description of the atmosphere. The model runs from that. But a perfect model of a “wrong” atmosphere will produce a wrong answer (ie a flawed weather forecast). “It is clear that our initialisations are inferior,” said Mr Mass, who believes that flawed initialisation was probably at play in the GFS forecast for Joaquin. “That’s the real problem. [The Europeans] have a lot more people and have taken a more sophisticated approach . . . There’s a subtlety that the European centre is getting right that we’re not.” › Specifically, the European model relies on many more observations than does the GFS – including satellite measurements of radiation from clouds, crucial in the absence of land-based observations. It also assimilates the data over time, starting with the weather heading into the forecast period and monitoring its evolution. The superiority of the European model is scarcely to be wondered at, since the supercomputer complex at ECMWF headquarters in Reading, England, is linked to the computer systems of the national weather services of 21 European member-nations and 13 cooperating states. Its archive of numerical weather prediction data is the world’s largest. › The GFS is making strides in the area of data assimilation, Mr Mass acknowledged to “The Upshot”. He added – unnecessarily – that the US model has a long way to go.

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J anuary 2016