Forecasts to a finer degree Weather prediction system boosts accuracy by 40%
Related Information
Weather modeling
About Matthew Haugland, who recently won a $25,000 grand prize in the National Collegiate Inventors Competition:
• Background: A native of San Jose, Calif, Haugland came to Oklahoma to pursue an education in weather. He earned undergraduate, master's and a doctorate degree from the University of Oklahoma.
• Winning entry's name: The Uncoupled Surface Layer Model
• What it does: Uses complex mathematical formulas to develop nighttime temperature forecasts for very specific locations.
• Haugland's business: The 26-year-old graduate of the University of Oklahoma's School of Meteorology has incorporated a business called NanoWeather Inc. to market his weather technology.
• On the Web: www.nanowx.com
Source: Matthew Haugland, OU College of Atmospheric
and Geographic Sciences
When the television weatherman forecasts tonight's low of, say, 32 degrees, he is really talking about the forecast low temperature at Will Rogers Airport, said Matthew Haugland.
That number could be miss the mark by as much as 20 to 25 degrees for some parts of the metro area because the temperature is dictated by a combination of terrain and vegetation, said Haugland, who earned his doctorate from the University of Oklahoma School of Meteorology earlier this year.
Haugland developed his own weather modeling program that factors in terrain and vegetation at very specific locations and turns out nighttime U.S. temperature forecasts that have been shown to be 40 percent more accurate than current modeling systems in place in the United States, he said.
"The beauty of my forecast model is that it can take current observations that are available such as at airports or Oklahoma Mesonet stations, an it uses that combined with high-resolution maps of terrain and vegetation," he said.
"I can do a forecast for your house and your neighbor's house down the street."
The weather modeling program, called "The Uncoupled Surface Layer Model," recently earned Haugland a $25,000 grand prize in the National Collegiate Investors Competition, which was sponsored by the National Inventors Hall of Fame Foundation.
"He won a national competition in academia, beating out Johns Hopkins, Stanford and Cal-Berkley," said Kenneth Crawford, a regents professor of meteorology at OU and Haugland's adviser on the project.
"That's like an academic national championship. No, it is an academic national championship."
Haugland has started a business called NanoWeather Inc. to commercialize the complex modeling program, and hopes to license the technology to major players in industries such as agriculture, energy and transportation.
He is flying to Tokyo later this week to meet with executives of Weathernews Inc., the world's largest private weather company.
The potential for NanoWeather is "huge," said Crawford, who is also director of the Oklahoma Climatological Survey.
"That's huge with a capital H-U-G-E," Crawford said. "I would say the biggest return would be in using our electricity resources wisely."
For example, an electricity generation company could use NanoWeather's location specific nighttime forecasts to guide production.
"They will not overgenerate on a day they don't need it and then waste that, or they will not undergenerate on day they do need it and then pay 20 times the price on the open market for electricity," Crawford said. "You are talking billions."
A 26-year-old California native who moved to Oklahoma as an undergraduate to pursue an education in meteorology, Haugland said his weather modeling program was built on a series of complicated formulas and tested on
