CHANAKANLABS

The 32GB Ceiling: Why Open Source Weather Models Aren't Truly Open

Last month, I spent nearly a week compiling Fortran code to simulate Typhoon Kalmaegi. The goal was straightforward: I wanted to run a local weather forecast, on my own hardware, tuned for the area I live in here in Thailand. I used the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. It worked. The outputs were accurate and detailed. But the cost was high. Each simulation required days of continuous compute, dense and unforgiving namelist configurations, and a dependency chain that felt less like