GRAF (Global High-Resolution Atmospheric Forecasting System)

2018: Announcement

On January 8, 2019 the CEO of IBM Ginny Rometti presented the new system of forecasting of weather developed by the company together with The Weather Company at the Consumer Electronics Show exhibition. To increase forecast accuracy in regions where there are no specialized meteorological installations, IBM is going to use for the first time given with the sensors of the atmosphere installed by airplanes.

It is about the solution under the name Global High-Resolution Atmospheric Forecasting System (GRAF) which will provide hourly updated high-precision weather forecast. GRAF allows to collect data from millions of devices and sensors worldwide and to continuously fill up the database about weather. Each user of the application of Weather Channel can make the contribution, having allowed IBM to be collected with data from the built-in barometers.

Ginny Rometti tells about the new system of forecasting of weather of GRAF

In many cases forecasts which cover, for example, 15-kilometer section are inaccurate and too general. At the same time most of them are updated time at 6-12 o'clock. The IBM GRAF system gives the forecast with an accuracy of 3 km and each hour updates it. The company considers that new development will allow to increase weather forecast accuracy by 200%.

Weather influences what people do day by day, and, perhaps, is the most important factor affecting business performance. Considering that even more often there are extreme weather situations, our new meteorological system will provide to each person and the organization around the world access to more exact and detailed weather forecasts — commented the head of department of Watson Media and Weather Cameron Clyaton.

For processing of all available and new data of GRAF will use the high-performance equipment of IBM based on Power9 — the symmetric multiprocessor designed for hard work with data. Power9 is used in the most powerful for the beginning of 2019 the Summit and Sierra supercomputers created by the U.S. Department of Energy.

The forecasts made by the new GRAF system will be available to users around the world through the The Weather Channel application later in 2019.^[1][2]

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