Consultancy

Climate change is forcing many businesses to consider how to adapt their business strategies and creating an urgent requirement for senior executives to understand the potential long term impact of climate change on their industry and their specific business.

MeteoGroup's MRD is involved in local and regional climate analyses and forecasts for all weather elements and is expert in interpreting the impact of climate change on specific industry sectors . Examples of recent work include:

• Forecasts for long-term wind energy production.
• Estimates of the impact of extreme precipitation for the Dutch Ministry of Traffic and Water Management.
• A 25 year climate forecast of the wet bulb temperature for a customer requiring this data for the cooling of their data centres.
• The determination of the number of de-icing actions per winter and its relation to temperature averages. Using climate forecasts, it was possible to give an estimate of the number of de-icing actions likely in the future.

Many companies are involved in dealing with significant weather hazards and need to impose relevant weather related safety measures. Others need to understand historical weather circumstances, in order to explain or reconstruct events. The research department at MeteoGroup is able to provide research and consultancy for these sectors.

Recent work includes an extensive analysis of wind conditions around a railway bridge in the Netherlands. MRD is also involved in work for the insurance industry delivering and interpreting weather data to support decision-making.

Sales and production of goods can have  a strong relationship with actual, recent and forecasted weather conditions. Typical examples are beverages, winter coats, garden equipment, but also natural gas and electricity. Traffic demand and airport capacity are also strongly dependent on weather conditions.

By means of regression analysis MeteoGroup’s MRD team has investigated many of these relationships for client-bespoke projects, and have developed tailored applications for the customer.

Landscape changes can have a significant affect on local climate conditions. For example the building of the second “Maasvlakte” in the North Sea, near the Dutch coast will have an impact on wind, temperature and cloud cover in the surrounding area. Many other development projects, such as building a dam or a large offshore wind farm, can also affect local climate conditions..

MeteoGroup’s MRD team has extensive experience of creating models to calculate how such  landscape change will influence the climate in the area

Local weather conditions may be important for the control of traffic safety or production capacity of a factory. In these cases it is not enough to interpolate or downscale observations from a weather station some tens of kilometres away. “In situ” research by a meteorologist may be necessary to find a good location for a specialised weather station.

Data from these stations may show very local characteristics, with temperature or wind speed deviating from the surroundings. Based on one or two years of data from a well situated local weather station, a statistical weather forecast (MOS) may be developed for the exact parameters and location where the forecast is needed. In our operational MOS forecast several of these client specific forecasts run operationally with 1-hourly updates. 

Weather forecasts or data can be delivered for any location in the world. Accuracy is highest when the forecasts or data are based on a time series of real time observations. However, many customers need data for locations that are far away from, or have a very different altitude from, the closest official weather station. In this instance MRD can develop downscaled observations or forecasts. This downscaling technique uses multiple algorithms, based on aspects such as distance to the coast, terrain and terrain height, the relationship with other weather elements and the availability of  “similar” locations with good observations.

Our operational automated forecast system produces high quality downscaled forecasts for more than 10,000 customer-specific locations worldwide, this number doubling every two years.

The work MeteoGroup have conducted on the WRF model enables high resolution meteorological data to be modeled on a global scale. High resolution modeling improves forecasting - against a traditional model for example, our research shows that WRF can improve a wind forecast by up to 16%. It is particularly useful in topographically challenging areas and extreme weather situations such as high wind speeds.

High resolution models are also useful for clients seeking information from areas where observations are sparse. They allow the calculation of parameters that cannot be derived from existing observations. Such techniques open a wide range of opportunities from ‘hindcasting’ significant weather events that have occurred in the past, to providing highly localised information for air quality analysis.