Businesses put out by the vagaries of the Irish weather can benefit from accurate forecasts. IBM, which has its Irish technology campus in Mulhuddart, west Dublin, says its Deep Thunder weather modelling system provides ‘hyper local forecasting’ – highly reliable weather forecasts for individual locations. IBM combines big data analytics and weather modelling technology for the system, which it has been testing it in the US for several years.
Sean McKenna, a senior research manager at IBM’s Smarter Cities Technology Centre, says that while traditional forecasting methods can predict the weather with some accuracy, they don’t necessarily give weather-sensitive businesses information that firms can act upon.
“What we do differently to traditional forecasts such as Met Eireann, for example, is specifically target a location,” says McKenna. “We provide very high resolution, very fine-grained forecasts both in space and in time, centred on a particular point. So the forecast could be centred on Dublin city centre or on a farming operation in Cork.”
Precision Agriculture
IBM believes that the system should interest wind energy producers. “Deep Thunder and additional IBM analytics predicts wind speed and direction, the temperature of the air, and analyses what this means on the output side for the amount of power a wind turbine is going to generate,” says McKenna.
In the agricultural sector, Deep Thunder is driving what is known as precision agriculture. Typically, the technology uses sensors placed in fields to measure the temperature and humidity of the soil and air, and this combines with satellite imagery to produce real-time data. Crop maturity predictive analytics can be used to make informed decisions to increase yields.
In Association with
Dublin City Council has also been collaborating with IBM on Deep Thunder to predict flood events. Gerry O’Connell, an engineer in charge of the Flood Advisory office, explains: “IBM takes satellite imagery and combines that with the rainfall data. It gives us specific information on the flood risk areas of the city and that is linked into the drainage network. The grid areas that they work to are a lot smaller than those currently used by Met Eireann. As a result, the information is more detailed and more accurate.”
In another climate-related initiative, the council has decided to step up its commitment to solar energy after IBM experts spent three weeks in the capital assessing the city’s potential to harness smart and green energy solutions. Dublin was one of 16 cities chosen to receive a ‘Smarter Cities Challenge’ grant from IBM in 2014, as part of the tech firm’s CSR initiative called ‘Smarter Planet’.
The challenge for IBM in Dublin was to find a way of using 430 municipally-owned buildings and other council assets to harvest smart or renewable energy. The IBM team made six recommendations to the council, starting with the suggestion that solar panels be installed on suitable city-owned properties before installing them on housing complexes and leisure centres.
One stumbling block in the deployment of solar technology is the lack of energy feed-in tariff (REFIT) schemes, which are currently only available for wind and biomass projects. Were it to be introduced for solar technology, IBM suggests, producers could sell solar energy back to the national grid.
In its first response, the council plans to install solar panels at the Civic Offices and on four library buildings this year. The partly EU-funded initiative is costing the council €250,000 and it estimates savings of €21,000 on annual energy bills.
