For the past 6 years a St. Paul, Minn., company has gathered scraps left by National Weather Service forecasters, the stream of hour-by-hour observations of atmospheric conditions over North America which are the starting point of their weather predictions.
Its from all over, on a 20-km horizontal spacing, says Mark Ahlstrom, CEO of WindLogics Inc. At each grid point there is a column of data going up multiple levels from the ground ... above 100 m, above 200 m and on up to the stratosphere. Weve got 5 terabytes of data.