Summery comeback; Big Blue sees green in weather

Our weather is about to take a turn for the warmer.

The cloudy and rainy pattern of recent days is fading, and sunshine increases as we move though today and Friday. Temperatures return to more summery levels as we head into the weekend.

Minnesota rides the warmer and sunnier western edge of Great Lakes high pressure the next few days. Showers and thunderstorms focus primarily in the Dakotas and northern Minnesota.

The Twin Cities forecast at a glance shows the trend of sunnier skies and warmer temperatures as we head into the weekend.

Big Blue sees green in weather

Big data? Meet big weather.

Many observers wondered why a huge company like IBM would spend a reported $2 billion on the "old media" weather company, also known as The Weather Channel.

Now we know why.

Here's more from MarketWatch on IBM's announcement of the first joint project with The Weather Channel, and how providing hyper-local data driven forecast to supply chain sensitive companies may be the future of corporate weather.

In 2015, IBM Corp. had everyone scratching their heads when it announced plans to buy The Weather Company. Was it for the sensors, stuck to buildings and satellites all around the world? Was it for the access to data, or to help retailers better prepare for unpredictable swings in weather?

Jokes ensued on Twitter following the announcement, with people picking apart IBM for misunderstanding the technical term “cloud,” and taking its transition to cloud computing from traditional hardware all too literally.

As it turns out, Big Blue had its reasons -- and it may finally put an end to retailers’ excuses of bad weather for poor financial results.

On Wednesday, IBM IBM, -0.45% revealed its first joint product with The Weather Company: a hyperlocal weather forecast—at a 0.2-mile to 1.2-mile resolution—to provide enterprise clients with short-term customized forecasts. It’s hoping to include this service, dubbed Deep Thunder, as part of a growing suite of products offered to enterprise clients through its Watson arm.

Panasonic is also investing heavily in it's own weather forecast models. Now it says it has the best weather model in the world. Here's that story from Ars Technica.

Large, multinational electronics company Panasonic now wants to crash the party. In an exclusive interview with Ars, Neil Jacobs, the chief scientist for Panasonic Weather Solutions, said the company has been running its own global model for several years on an 11,000-core supercomputer.

And that PWS model, he said, has not only been outperforming the GFS model but has become competitive with the gold-standard ECMWF model. "We started the global model development in 2008 and finally got to the point where we were outperforming ECMWF by late last year," Jacobs said.

There are various ways to measure model accuracy, but one of the most widely recognized is "anomaly correlation" at the 500mb, or mid-level of the atmosphere, over a 30-day average. Higher scores are better.

Recently, Jacobs said, the PWS model has scored a .926, compared to a .923 for the ECMWF and .908 for the GFS. Essentially, then, a team of five weather modelers and five software engineers, as well as about 20 meteorologists and computer modeling experts at universities under contract, claims to have beaten the best government weather forecasting centers in the world.

There's money in the weather business so it seems.

Stay tuned.