Greetings, everybody, to my blog - Hippie Dux Weather Decentralized. Here, I'll be discussing the many problems with weather forecasting, and potential solutions to those problems. But first, Why Hippie Dux, you may ask? Well, I'm a hippie, and I raise ducks. I'll begin with some anecdotal information regarding my personal experience with weather forecasting shortfalls, a brief background of my history with weather forecasting, and then the two main problems on which I'll be focusing - monopolization of data and defunding of US Government public weather services.
First, I'd like to ask you all to think about the weather forecasting for your area. Is it accurate? How accurate is it? Do you have one go-to source that can handle all of your weather needs, or do you have to check multiple sites for accuracy? When a big storm is predicted for your area, how much warning do you get? Do your tornado/fire/hurricane/tsunami alerts work?
Now for some more serious questions. Have you ever been significantly delayed in your commute or during long distance travel by "unforeseen" weather? Did you or someone you know suffer significantly in the Texas, Mississippi, Oregon, or Washington ice storms? Have you suffered property damage or injury from "freak" thunderstorms?
Now, for perhaps the most important question of all. Did your insurance cover the damage, or did they determine that it was an "act of God," and deny your claim? That's come to be the average insurance agency's purpose in life these days - denying claims and "saving their company money," as if that money is theirs to begin with. I could give a 30 minute lecture on this without notes, but it's a topic for another post, so moving on.
Now, if you're anything like me, you replied in the negative to a lot of those questions. Is the forecasting in my area accurate? Not even remotely. Do I have one source? No, I have to pull data from two commercial services and personal observations if I want any hope of accuracy. How much warning do we get for storms? What storms? We've had 20 or 30 warned storms that never arrived, several unwarned storms that did arrive (including a rare snow accumulation event), and one forecasted storm that actually arrived. One. Singular. Uno. Ein. Unless you're one for one, single win averages are terrible. Additionally, there have been several times, while living in other, much more populated locations, where nothing was forecast at all, and a "freak storm" would add significant travel time to people's commutes. I can think of five separate snow storms that surprised the Puget Sound region when I lived up there, all of which caused massive delays, thousands of dollars in damages and towing fees, millions of dollars in lost wages, and general havoc to the point where people will give up trying to get home and walk to a hotel.
These are all very serious problems, and with Climate Change occurring essentially unchecked, the weather events that cause these problems are getting more frequent, and the weather is becoming less easily predictable. It's still predictable, but the framework that we're currently working within is limiting us, and we need to expand our processing power immensely.
Decentralization via blockchain (Crypto) networks is our only chance. Blockchain transaction ledgers can eliminate trust issues between entities, overcoming incredible stumbling blocks that typical research sharing can't match. Furthermore, I believe we need to continue the decentralization process that Weather Underground started before being bought out by IBM. They distributed the weather data gathering via the Personal Weather Station system, but all of it ultimately feeds into the IBM Cloud for analysis and processing. If we outsource the data processing as well as gathering, we can provide an even more real-time analysis to all users in a continual downstream loop as weather events occur - each individual device performing analyses of increasingly difficult, but initially quite simple, parameters before passing on the data to the next node down the line AND the network for further analysis and data compiling. For this immense project, I'm proposing IOTA and Horizen Labs, for their approaches to security, decentralization, and rapid transactions; and I will be researching them further before putting forward a White Paper for a new company based on decentralizing the weather forecasting and analysis worldwide, to stop reliance on failing systems whose budgets can be cut at the whim of an infantile politician.
