Whiffle sets new standard for local weather forecasting and introduces finecasting to the maritime industry
The art and science of precisely predicting tomorrow’s local weather patterns almost seems impossible - and just a few years ago it was. That was until Dutch company Whiffle Weather Finecasting managed to develop a new standard of local weather forecasting in 2015.
working alongside each other, benefitting from each other’s knowledge and expertise.
Whiffle was founded by Remco and Dr Harmen Jonker, who was at that time the Professor of Atmospheric Physics at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft). Remco was working on a PhD about renewable energy integration. “We realised that detailed local weather forecasting was very valuable for the renewables industry, particularly when integrating the wind and solar farms into the energy system. And given the dramatic growth in wind energy we believed this technology could play a role in the acceleration of the sector. However, we also saw that not much is known about the wind and sun of tomorrow.”
I 6 report
n just five years, Whiffle’s finecasting data is being used by a substantial number of the Dutch offshore wind
farms, but the company is now exploring how it can be deployed to benefit the whole maritime world. Several pilot projects are underway worldwide, one of which took place in the Port of Rotterdam, and results look promising.
Here we interview Founder and Director of Operations Dr Remco Verzijlbergh and he outlines how MARIN and Whiffle are
Breakthrough due to GPUs Alongside this, there was a significant technological breakthrough, which was also realised at TU Delft. Whiffle's unique finecasting technology is based on Large Eddy Simulations, which have been used in academia to examine clouds and turbulence since the 1980s. In 2010, computer scientists at the university were experimenting to see if certain computations could be made by the use of Graphical Processing Units (GPUs). They
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