London - For an organisation that is regularly under a cloud for getting its forecasts wrong, it is a bold prediction.
The British Met Office says it is about to become the best in the world at forecasting the weather – thanks to a £100-million supercomputer.
Around 13 times more powerful than the current model, the Cray XC40 will take up two large rooms, weigh as much as 11 double decker buses and perform 16 000 trillion calculations per second. That is the equivalent of more than 3 million sums a second for every man, woman and child on the planet.
The supercomputer will provide more accurate information for airports, train companies, the emergency services and ordinary members of the public. It is expected to save the economy £200-billion by 2020 – by reducing transport disruption, improving flood warnings and better anticipating seasonal energy and food demands.
Bought with taxpayers’ funding, it will, according to the Met Office, “enable the UK to lead the world”.
News of the computer, which will be the most powerful used for meteorology in the world, follows a string of gaffes by the national weather forecaster. These include the “barbecue summer” of 2009 which was, in fact, a washout, and weatherman Michael Fish’s breezy dismissal of the Great Storm of 1987.
The new computer, which will be switched on next autumn, will be able to update forecasts every hour instead of every six hours.
It will run through far more possible weather forecasts, and look for common features to improve accuracy. As a result, the forecast for a day ahead should be just as reliable as the 12-hour forecast is at the moment. The 140-ton machine, which will be housed in Exeter, will also be used to make predictions about changes to the climate up to a century from now – but it still won’t be able to accurately predict the weather months ahead of time. Science minister Greg Clark said: “I think a nation that is as taken with the weather as Britain ought to be leading the world in forecasting it. This makes us world leaders, not only in talking about the weather, but forecasting it too.”
And Met Office chief executive Rob Varley said: “Everything from the simple question of ‘Do I need to take my umbrella?’ through to really important questions around contingency planning for severe weather, even longer-term planning in terms of energy supplies for the coming winter.
“All of these decisions are crucial to the running of the country, keeping people safe and helping people prosper, all these are underpinned by supercomputing.”
However, even a £100-million supercomputer has its limits. Mr Varley added: “It’s never going to be possible to predict in May which of the weeks in August is going to be best to take a holiday. We need to be realistic about what we can expect from our seasonal forecast.” - Daily Mail