By Aerol B. Patena
MANILA, Nov. 27 (PNA) — The Philippine Council for Industry, Energy and Emerging Technology Research and Development (PCIEERD) of the Department of Science and Technology is currently holding a “Nowcasting” Competition which aims to challenge students to utilize their research and computer programming skills in providing short-ranged weather forecasting.
The contest intends to come up with a weather forecasting model for Metro Manila that should be able to monitor convective storms and predict storm attributes such as the probability of hail, hail size, storm velocity and precipitation for the next six hours using the latest data from radar, satellite, automatic weather stations, automatic rain gauges and output from the state weather agency’s rainfall stations.
The competitors will test their models under the supervision of a Nowcasting Competition Team from the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA) and outputs of the developed model will be used for the actual observation available for Metro Manila.
Winning entries shall be selected based on the accuracy of the rainfall forecast by a panel of judges consisting of representatives from PAGASA, University of the Philippines –National Institute of Environmental Science (IESM) and the Advanced Science and Technology Institute (ASTI).
Big prizes are at stake in the competition: P 200,000, P 150,000 and P 100,000 for the first, second and third place winners, respectively, while the faculty adviser of the winning entries will receive 25 percent of the prize.
Students enrolled in any college or university in the country may join the competition which is being conducted from September 2013 to June 2014 to capture the monsoon season.
“With the recent natural disasters caused by climate change, Nowcasting could very well become a useful tool in the government’s efforts in disaster preparedness,” PCIEERD Executive Director Rowena Cristina Guevarra said.
Nowcasting, as defined by the World Meteorological Organization, is the detailed description of the current weather along with forecasts obtained by extrapolating data from the current time to six hours ahead.
Within this timeframe, it is possible to forecast small-scale weather events such as thunderstorms and tornadoes with reasonable accuracy. (PNA)