In Monday's innovation column, Anicet Mbida looks back at the deadly floods in southeastern France this weekend. As he explains in the morning of Matthieu Belliard, new forecasting models will help deliver more accurate and up-to-date information to the public.

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With four deaths and one person still missing, the deadly floods this weekend in south-eastern France have shown the importance of precision forecasting models to effectively inform the population of the magnitude of the weather to which they have to face. And if the current models currently lack accuracy, the latest innovations currently under development should allow the future to significantly refine forecasts, as our journalist Anicet Mbida in his innovation column on Monday morning explains.

"This is good news after the bad weather of this weekend: a new weather forecast model is coming in. It is much more accurate and updated every hour. To give you an idea, the current models cut the world into squares of 10 to 13 km and updates every 6 or 12 hours.The new model, it works on areas of 3 km2 updated every hour, so it is 4 times more accurate.

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This means that there will be fewer holes and we will be able to spot extreme events (hurricanes, big storms ...) anywhere on the planet from the very beginning of their formation. It's a model called GRAF that has just been deployed by IBM. "

What is the relationship between IBM and the weather? Do they provide the supercomputers?

"Yes, because you need a lot of computing power to run the model, but mostly because IBM bought The Weather Group in 2016. So it's become a major player in weather forecasting. In the end, he plans to use The Weather Channel application to retrieve weather data from all over the planet.

I do not know if you know, but all phones today have a barometer. It is not used for the weather, but to detect changes in altitude (that's what tells you how many stairs you have mounted). The goal is to use the data from this barometer to crisscross the earth much more thinly and have even more accurate weather forecasts. With climate change, these precisions will become more and more critical, so all the tools will be good to take. "