OWS has recently commissioned a new Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) atmospheric model grid encompassing the entire South China Sea with a higher resolution sub grid covering the important offshore oil & gas industry region off the coast of northwest Borneo.
The early use of the model has shown some promising results. One example includes the WRF model identifying a local affect causing a plume of stronger winds near Palawan which has never been identified on coarser global atmospheric models. This local generation of winds was only previously noted by personnel offshore in certain synoptic situations, but could not be correlated with coarse global atmospheric modelling. It is now possible to forecast the region and length of time this wind, and subsequently generated waves, may affect clients working in the region.
The WRF Model is a next-generation mesoscale numerical weather prediction system designed to serve both operational forecasting and atmospheric research needs. It features multiple dynamical cores, a 3-dimensional variational (3DVAR) data assimilation system, and a software architecture allowing for computational parallelism and system extensibility. WRF is suitable for a broad spectrum of applications across scales ranging from meters to thousands of kilometres.
For more information on OWS modelling capabilities, please contact us through our contact link.