Comment Re:We should buy them some windows (Score 3, Insightful) 53
In the US anyway, TV weather persons don't do their own forecasts - they rely on their local National Weather Service reports. And those are based on actual meteorologists looking at what the US's GFS says, as well as the European ECMWF, and combining it with their own experience regarding what the models tend to get right/wrong locally.
UW's professor Cliff Mass has written, many times, about the problems with US weather prediction. The computers they rely on are old and less powerful than the European ones - plus it's exacerbated by the US NWS having a broader mandate, so the computers they do have are used to run several other types of simulations in addition to the standard weather models.
This purchase is definitely good news.