Whom is the forecasting tool intended for?

The International Business Machines Corporation, known as IBM, says it is making technology for precise weather predictions available to everyone.
    The company said the new weather forecasts offer more details and bring a level of precision once available only in major industrial countries.
    The forecasting tool is expected to help emergency officials better predict where severe storms will hit. It may also aid airline companies planning flight paths, as well as farmers caring for crops.
    The new system creates weather forecasts more often and with finer details than what is available outside the United States, Europe and Japan.
    Most forecasts have a resolution of 10 to 15 square kilometers and provide new information every 6 to 12 hours. IBM’s Global High-Resolution Atmospheric Forecasting System goes down to 3 square kilometers and provides information every hour.
    That kind of precision can provide details of where and when extremely heavy rain will fall. That could be useful in emergency situations, and could help farmers decide when to plant, harvest and fertilize crops.
    Fred Carr, emeritus meteorology professor at the University of Oklahoma, said, "The United States has a similar high-resolution forecasting system, but it’s just for the U.S. because it takes so much computer time. To do it for the whole globe is a pretty significant achievement."
    He added that it is possible to quickly collect observations from radar, airplanes and surface measurements in the United States. But he said it is not clear how IBM gets information from the other 98% of the world.
    He said he believes there will be problems in getting information, so "sometimes those forecasts aren’t going to be very accurate."
    Users will be able to decide for themselves. The system now operates on the weather.com website and the Weather Channel’s application program for smartphones.
    In the future, IBM hopes to improve its forecasts by collecting information from atmospheric pressure sensors used in smartphones.
    These sensors improve the precision of global positioning system, or GPS, technology. For example, they can help fitness tracking instruments measure how many steps a user has climbed.