Patent ID: 7542852

Claim:
A system for deriving very short-term weather forecasts comprising: a database storing weather data and forecast information; a plurality of forecasting techniques; a forecast engine for determining a blend of inputs from said plurality of forecasting techniques; very short-term weather forecasts generated by said forecast engine from said blend of inputs from said plurality of forecasting techniques; and an output system for outputting said very short-term weather forecasts, wherein said forecast engine further comprises a core system interpolation, wherein said core system interpolation provides: a plurality of very short-term meteorological quantities extracted from a public domain dataset at all grid point intersections over a specific location, wherein said a plurality of very short-term meteorological quantities are adjusted from knowledge of a number of nearby human-driven forecasts corresponding to the same point in time; a first estimate of meteorological quantities comprising said adjusted meteorological quantities, wherein said first estimate is derived using a downscaling technique based on knowledge of at least one of: climatological gradients or microclimatological relationships of said meteorological quantities in the vicinity of said grid points for said specific location; and a second estimate for said meteorological quantities produced by a radar fingerprinter that finds a corresponding future radar image from predicted radar images and future lightning density forecasts that match a valid forecast time, wherein said radar fingerprinter produces said second estimate of said meteorological quantities from a small spatial sub-domain of predicted radar reflectivity, radar-based precipitation type, and lightning probability fields.