Abstract:In such an industry related to people’s livelihood, the potential of artificial intelligence, big data and supercomputer technologies is infinite. Zhou Zheng, the MVP of Huawei Cloud, is one of the technology practitioners. He is leading his team to bring a gentle but powerful spring breeze to the domestic meteorological industry.

Weather forecasting is a technical job. Big data, supercomputer and AI are all necessary. We are cloud experts.

Weather is related to the production and life of all people on the earth. In ancient times, people ate by watching the sky. Nowadays, we watch the weather forecast to prepare for work and life in advance. For example:

  • Forecast typhoons, floods, give early warning, make emergency plans;
  • Forecast air quality by combining pollution emission data and air flow;
  • Modify the culture strategy of Marine culture in time according to climate change;
  • …

In addition, defense, transportation, insurance, smart cities and other fields all rely on meteorological data.

In such an industry related to people’s livelihood, the potential of artificial intelligence, big data and supercomputer technologies is infinite. Zhou Zheng, the MVP of Huawei Cloud, is one of the technology practitioners. He is leading his team to bring a gentle but powerful spring breeze to the domestic meteorological industry.

Weather market dividend: 20 times in 5 years

The year 2015 marked a turning point in the weather world, when the era of monopolies ended and weather services were gradually opened up to commercial companies.

According to statistics, the meteorological market will have a 20-fold growth space in the next few years and will reach a market size of 300 billion in 2025.

Compared with the previous seven years, which doubled, the dividends brought by the opening of the market are obvious. A large number of new start-ups are pouring in. In 2018, Zhou Zheng also resolutely stepped into this wave.

Before founding Nine Party Technology, Zhou Zheng had accumulated some skills in the field of meteorology. He is a senior engineer in the Department of Earth System Science at Tsinghua University, and has also served as a department supervisor and senior engineer at the National Supercomputing Center (Wuxi).

Zhou Zheng is good at system structure design and core algorithm design. He has participated in the research and development of many national major scientific research projects, published papers, software patents, various national awards, etc.

It was his research work at the Wuxi National Center for Supercomputing that led to his meteorology big data venture. Zhou Zheng led about 20 colleagues from the Department of Earth System Numerical Simulation to explore the way of supercomputer industrialization and commercial meteorological service commercialization.

The strong combination of technical talents has enabled this start-up company, which came out of the national scientific research team, to achieve profit for three consecutive years.

It is not easy to make an accurate forecast

As the founder and CEO of the company, Zhou Zheng led the core research and development team, based on the “Sunway Taihulight” supercomputer system, combined with supercomputing and artificial intelligence technology, developed the domestic independent intelligent grid forecast platform, which has made technological breakthroughs in the field of meteorological and oceanographic numerical forecast.

Taking numerical ocean forecasting as an example, Zhou said that in Marine farming, kelp breaks when the water runs too fast. If the temperature is too high, the sea cucumber will simply turn into water. If the temperature is suddenly too low, the crab will not survive.

Therefore, through the “three-dimensional intelligent forecast system of Marine elements”, they use scientific means to analyze the situation of seafood farming areas, which can not only forecast ocean temperature, salinity, ocean current information, but also forecast nutrients, Marine biochemistry and other elements.

“All we do is get the weather forecast right.” This seems like an easy one, but it’s also one of the most challenging. Zhou Zheng said that they are positioned as data producers, rather than data carriers.

Therefore, Zhou Zheng and his team have combined atmospheric, ocean, wave, sea ice and land surface weather forecasting models, gathered satellite, radar, station and other data, combined with numerical prediction, artificial intelligence and supercomputing technologies, to form a complete industrial capability and technical barrier from weather forecasting to meteorological information application.

And unlike most weather companies, Zhou and his team have their own numerical models and the ability to directly process source data and use them. This is their big asset.

By combining data with AI algorithms, they can use powerful computing power to produce more accurate and precise weather forecast data. It is known that they can further improve the time and space accuracy of atmospheric and ocean forecasts to the minute-level update and 100-meter grid level. In air pollution monitoring, for example, Zhou and his team have achieved an accuracy of nearly 90 percent. In the case of El Nino, you can predict six months in advance and so on.

Zhou Zheng and Huawei cloud cooperation, also let their weather forecasting capabilities to a higher level. For example, through Huawei cloud HPC cluster to build air pollution early warning system. Among them, the HPC management node delivers the computing tasks through the SGE resource scheduling system, and the computing nodes in the cluster based on the elastic cloud server undertake the main computing tasks. Meanwhile, all the processing results are stored in the elastic file service and the storage results are shared.

It is understood that Huawei’s cloud HPC solutions are optimized for HPC Workload, and HPC resources are rented on demand, which can help users reduce costs, improve the efficiency and accuracy of weather forecast, and help weather business to quickly transform into intelligent, cloud-based and digital.

The last

Through years of deep research in the meteorological industry, Zhou Zheng and his team have also achieved a series of honors and qualifications through years of technological breakthroughs. He has won many awards in various national, provincial and municipal competitions and accumulated 26 intellectual property rights such as patents and software works. They have also completed more than 10 national research projects and published a large number of scientific research results. It has also joined China Meteorological Service Association, National Marine Information Industry Development Alliance, China Ports Association and Huawei Solutions Partnership Strategic Cooperation Plan.

Future Zhou Zheng will also face G end and B end customers with intensification of meteorological data and integrated solutions, including cooperation and huawei cloud, based on the research of numerical model and artificial intelligence forecasting technology to provide customers in the industry more fine and more targeted products and services, covering intelligent weather forecast, atmospheric environmental protection field of navigation, shipping, finance, insurance and so on.

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