PredictWind Switches to Amazon Web Services For Online Wind Forecasts

We are pleased to announce that the PredictWind site has switched to Amazon Web Services (AWS) meaning our forecasts are served up fresher than ever before. This has been a huge undertaking, but the result is a faster site providing a much better service to our customers. Next time you log into the site you'll notice the speed difference in 2 main areas:

Wind Forecast Relevancy

The PredictWind model was developed over years of testing in the most competitive race in the world, the America's cup. The model was tested and proven to provide the most accurate forecasts possible.

The PredictWind model takes the general forecast information from the CMC and GFS observational data, to provide the most accurate forecasts, down to a 1km resolution. To run the forecast model across the entire globe requires a significant amount of processing power.

Our previous server configuration required us to split the Earth up into 4 different segments and run the model on each quarter separately. As it took over 2.5 hours to run the model on each segment, the forecasts weren't complete until 11 hours after the initial forecast file started.

Now with Amazon Web Services we are able to run the model for the whole Earth at once, and with the incredible power of AWS the model can be completed for the whole planet in just 2 hours.

This means your forecasts a served up fresher and more accurate than ever before.

Website Speed

Because of the power of AWS we have been able to reduce the load time for dynamic pages by at least 50%. Dynamic web pages are the ones that need to query the server before displaying information.

So the next time you open any forecast page you'll notice a significant reduction in the page load time. This is attributed to the speed in the AWS servers.

Where the server needs to do more computational work, such as calculating the fastest route for the Weather Routing tool, there have been some significant improvements. We are seeing speed increases of up to 3 times! For example a weather route that used to take 45 seconds now will just take 15 seconds.

We hope you enjoy these improvements and we look forward to continue improving PredictWind in the future!

The PW Team!