Founded in 2007, PredictWind commercialised America's Cup wind forecast technology and made it available at the highest possible resolution to users worldwide. Its service combines data from satellite, land, air and sea observations to produce highly accurate predictions of wind direction and wind speed within any 1km radius, for every hour in the next 24 hours. This is versus a 60km radius the majority of competitive forecasts provide. Initially used mainly for maritime activities, more than 80,000 consumer and business subscribers now access the service to guide everything from outdoor leisure activities to industrial activity and building design.
PredictWind switched to the advanced networking and high computational capabilities of Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a way to better process sophisticated computational algorithms to improve the accuracy and timeliness of its weather data. Previously PredictWind’s much smaller computing capacity of 25 on-premise servers required splitting the world into four regions and processing these on rotation. This typically took 22-hours a day to provide morning and night forecasts. Using the Cluster Compute Instances of the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for its high performance computing power, PredictWind now has on-demand access to almost six times the equivalent supercomputing power to process its Volvo Ocean Race-proven weather models, so it can now concurrently compute the entire world at once in approximately four hours.
“Weather conditions can change quickly in a maritime environment and securing the highest resolution forecast in the shortest time possible is the crucial difference between a good and bad forecast, which shape the decisions people make and their outcomes – whether it’s determining tactics in a yacht race or deciding whether to cancel an outdoor event,” said Jon Bilge, founder of PredictWind.
“By running PredictWind’s application on the high performance computing power of Amazon Web Services, we can now process the entire planet’s weather patterns at once and provide more detailed forecasts at better resolutions up to nine hours earlier than before. This is a significant step forward in weather forecasting that will impact many involved in maritime and outdoor activities.”
The move to AWS provides a flexible platform for PredictWind to innovate rapidly and roll-out a range of new services. This includes an offshore weather application for use over Satellite Communication, race tracking via smartphone devices (for iPhone , Android, Blackberry & Windows7 phone), and operating the weather model for research organisations that require on demand weather modelling.
For more information, please visit: www.predictwind.com
