With the availability of affordable computer clusters to small business firms, site-specific regional weather forecasts for use by commercial entities such as power companies are becoming viable and such forecasts no longer require supercomputers and/or large groups of research personnel. However, a host of issues need further research, for example, on how to improve weather forecast accuracy using high-resolution atmospheric profiles of wind, temperature, and moisture and useful forecast lead time.

Our recent efforts at RESPR, such as building a Beowulf computer cluster, to resolve a handful of the many forecast-related issues, our understanding of what the customer needs are for high resolution forecasts in the renewable energy sector, how critical collaborative efforts among small business firms to address those needs can be, etc. will be presented to generate a healthy discussion among weather forecast product users and forecast service providers.