It might be all about higher, faster and stronger on the track – but hotter,
wetter, smoggier, will be the motto for an unofficial event at the Beijing
Games: weather forecasting.
Teams of experts from seven countries will be competing to be the Olympic
forecasting champion. Every three hours scientists from Japan, the US,
Australia, Canada, Austria, France and China will be analysing observational
data and atmospheric pressure to predict the temperature, humidity and
precipitation for the Beijing area for up to 36 hours ahead. Their forecasts
will be submitted to the China Meteorological Administration, which will
judge them against the weather.
The Weather Demonstration Project is part of a global research programme
started in 1999 by the World Meteorological Organisation, the United
Nations’ official “voice” on the weather. The project, which featured at the
Sydney Games in 2000, is designed to showcase the latest technology used by
national agencies.
Japan is favourite to take gold despite making a number of errors in the
warm-up competition last year. Kazuo Saito, the team leader, identified the
Chinese as a threat, however.
Britain will not be represented. It dropped out of the annual forecast
demonstration programme in 2006 because of a lack of resources. “If you look
at the other nations taking part, they’re a centrally-funded part of
government. We stand or fall on the profit we make,” a spokesman from the
Met Office said.
One aim of the exercise is to test advances in the ensemble prediction
technique, which reduces the margin for error in long-term forecasting by
taking the average value from a collection of forecasts.
The weather has become something of an obsession for the Chinese in the run-up
to the Games amid concerns that the athletes will be hampered by extreme
heat, humidity and pollution. Haile Gebrselassie, the world record holder
for marathon running and an asthma sufferer, has pulled out of the Games
because of health concerns.
The Chinese Weather Manipulation Office has employed various techniques to
ensure perfect weather at the Games, including cloud-seeding – shooting
silver iodide pellets into clouds to induce rainfall away from Olympic
venues and help to clear smog. Olympic organisers also bought a
multimillion-dollar IBM supercom-puter, which is 1,000 times faster than any
weather-forecasting system used in previous Games. It will provide every
venue with three-hourly forecasts and half-hourly satellite pictures. The
information will be distributed via text messages, television screens,
scoreboards and the internet.
The average temperature between August 8 and 24, the duration of the Games, is
25C (77F), with a relative humidity of 77 per cent – well above what is
considered comfortable. A study of weather patterns over the past 30 years
shows that the chance of rain during the opening ceremony is even, with a 25
per cent chance of thunderstorms. Leaving nothing to chance on the big
night, Chinese officials have 26 cloud-dispersal cannon on standby.
Weather modification through the ages
— Before the Greek army sailed to Troy, legend states, Agamemnon sacrificed
his daughter, Iphigenia, for fair winds In ancient
— In Ancient Rome rain-making rites included throwing straw puppets into the
Tiber
— In 1896 an Austrian winegrower invented a device which produced a giant
smoke ring to encourage rain rather than hail
— Between 1962 and 1983 the US sought to decrease the strength of cyclones
with silver iodide
— In the Vietnam war the US seeded clouds to encourage heavy rain along the Ho
Chi Minh Trail
