Weather Monitoring Station
WEATHER MONITORING STATION IN ICELAND The studio will look at current and future digital technologies / soft wares, which are applied in the study for global simulations and control of weather systems. The students will design a monitoring station and its other. In order for this research unit to be independent, it needs economic support, and built-in intelligence. The study of the innate character of the program and site-specific data will result in an additional supporting program, which ultimately sponsors the research unit. The station will be located in Iceland, only vast ice caps and/or deserts have high enough atmospheric clarity to allow for uninterrupted satellite connections.REAL-TIME INFORMATIONThe melting of the ice-cap, the hole in the ozone layer, larger and larger wildfires; all mentioned in a recent issues of major newspapers, show the urgency of the monitoring and studying emerging weather patterns on a global scale. Institutions like TAO (the Tropical Atmosphere Ocean network monitoring El Nina and La Nina), NCAR (The National Center for Atmospheric Research), NASA and the International Tsunami Center (monitoring monstrous waves caused by undersea earthquakes), are modeling the changes in climate, and consequences for habitats. They are currently all interconnected and directly connected to GPS and satellite networks. These large-scale global networks consist of numerous small monitoring nodes, constantly updating and emitting real-time information to the stations. They thus predict, and hopefully prevent, large scale disasters from natural phenomena. Interesting to note: any natural occurrence evolves in three stages; generation, propagation and inundation. One needs to take measure in the generation stage (Tsunamis have a reach of 100 km and longer) in order to have a chance to take precautions before the inundation stage.CORPORATIONThe studio will take on the challenge to investigate/analyze the complex behaviors of these systems. This can directly inform the behavior and growth pattern of the station as a corporation; As Kevin Kelly notes in New Rules for the New Economy; \”Now new company structures develop and behave not unlike organisms evolving in an ecosystem\”. He calls these organisms – biomes – rich, interactive and highly flexible shapes. So here the weather monitoring station no longer functions as a government-funded institution, but instead as a dynamically developing entity, self-sufficient and independent. The search for its economically viable \’other\’ will allow this station to be constantly on the edge of new technologies. The weather monitoring station will form one of the interactive nodes, or \’biomes\’ in the global network of monitoring stations. This tendency; the breaking up from large-scale operations into a swarm of smaller individual units, was discussed by futurist Alvin Toffler: \’the era of mass society is over\’. No more mass production, mass consumption, mass entertainment – but a world of demassified niches, niche production, and niche cultures. A society of subcultures, with net-centric alternatives, is developing. This culture of the middle which fulfills the need of commerce -connected through electronic communication space – opens a new market approach.SIMULATED WEATHER SYSTEMS/WEATHER MODELLINGIn science, one of the subcultures is the meteorology branch of mathematics, where weather simulation is modeled and represented in data scapes. Originally chosen as an \’ideal computer modeling project\’ by John von Neumann in the Princeton Institute for advanced studies (1950), the study of weather patterns lead to being one of the first mapped out computer-generated data. The computation time for a 24-hour forecast was then 24 hours…….. something, which is now real-time updated.Around 1960, Edward Lorenz, another mathematician and meteorologist (MIT), built a primitive c