Very cool to see! I was active in the UO emulator communities back in the day but mostly with SphereServer. It is interesting to see here in the comments how many people were inspired to programming because of UO!
All the recent LLM advances would make for very interesting and very fun NPC interactions in a MMORPG today too. Even small player community servers could be viable long term because of the ability to seed complex interactions with NPCs into on-going story lines.
Very few companies run the vertically-integrated stack because it is prohibitively expensive to do so with current NWP versus what you can sell it for with only marginal forecast improvements. I know several companies have tried this with integrating their own observation sources and ended up with worse performing forecasts. Oops.
I'm very interested to see how the ML modeling revolution changes this. The ability to perform global forecasts on a single GPU should make it cost competitive for more companies. I know several companies are already deriving their own weights for the forecasting component so that they can sell them. Google appears to be working on the next piece of the puzzle too with using ML for the data assimilation step, or skipping that altogether and using observations to go directly to forecasts.
You buried a lot of great analysis in your white paper that is hard to find! The comparison to NOAA Atlas 14 really shows what to expect with this dataset and how to better use it.
My guess is that potential customers who know how to use this data with their flood model also know how to derive this data from the sources. You may need to compute inundation maps for X year return periods in order to reach customers who need this information but don't know how to use flood models.
Really nice website and backend though! It's so fast even given the volume of data. Very impressive
All the recent LLM advances would make for very interesting and very fun NPC interactions in a MMORPG today too. Even small player community servers could be viable long term because of the ability to seed complex interactions with NPCs into on-going story lines.