Farming News - Met Office: £97m supercomputer to improve weather and climate prediction

Met Office: £97m supercomputer to improve weather and climate prediction

 

The Met Office will begin building a new government-funded supercomputer at its headquarters in Exeter.

 

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Funding for the £97 million supercomputer was confirmed on Tuesday. The Met Office claims its new system will cement the UK's position as a world leader in weather and climate prediction and deliver £2 billion worth of socio-economic benefits to the UK.

 

The new High Performance Computer (HPC) will be 13 times more powerful than the current system used by the Met Office, and have 120,000 times more memory than a top-end smartphone. It will enable more detailed forecasts (with a resolution of 1.5km) to be updated every hour, rather than every three hours, and make more geographically precise forecasts possible.

 

On making the announcement, the Met Office said the HPC will also be able to predict adverse weather events such as flooding, strong winds, fog and heavy snowfall more effectively. Important areas such as airports could also benefit from more detailed forecasts of disruptive weather patterns.

 

Hopefully, this could lead to producing winter forecasts months in advance, and assessing the specific regional impacts of climate change such as floods, droughts and heatwaves.

 

Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Danny Alexander, commented on announcing the funding, "We are a country fascinated by the weather, so it's no surprise that from early barometers to this weather supercomputer, we've always led the way in developing technology to predict the weather. 

 

"This £97m investment is a crucial part of the government's wider drive to make the UK the best place in the world to do science and research.  By bringing world-class technology to the south west, we are also boosting regional investment and expertise, creating a stronger economy and fairer society."

 

The supercomputer will be based at the Met Office's Exeter site and Exeter Science Park, and will gradually become operational from September next year, though it won't reach full capacity until 2017.

 

At capacity, the new system will be able to perform more than 16,000 trillion calculations per second, and at 140 tonnes, will weigh the equivalent of 11 double decker buses.

 

On Tuesday, Met Office Chief Executive Rob Varley welcomed the funding, saying, "We are very excited about this new investment in UK science. The new supercomputer, together with improved observations, science and modelling, will deliver better forecasts and advice to support UK business, the public and government. It will help to make the UK more resilient to high impact weather and other environmental risks."


Speaking to the BBC, Varley assured that the new supercomputer will "Answer the real questions people need to know," adding, "We can tell you that the global average temperature is going to increase by 3C or 4C if we carry on as we are - but the critical question is what is that going to mean for London? What is it going to mean for Scotland? What is it going to mean for my back garden? At the moment the general looks that we can produce really don't answer those kinds of questions."