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Met Office hails supercomputing success

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Supercomputer

Kable

Published: 27 Apr 2005 17:40 BST

It has achieved an 11 percent reduction in the error rate for its predictions for the northern hemisphere, a spokesperson told Government Computing News on 27 April, 2005.

This follows the installation of an NEC SX-6 supercomputer in spring 2004, and compares with an average error reduction rate of 3 percent in the other five major weather modelling centres in France, Germany, the US, Canada and Japan.

On a global basis, the Met Office has achieved a 6 percent reduction in the error rate.

The supercomputer provided a six-fold increase in processing capacity compared with the old model, and enabled the Met Office to use models with a finer resolution to predict the weather.

On 12 April, 2005, it began to use a new supercomputer with even more processing nodes, the NEC SX-8. The spokesperson said it is working on a model that uses 12km 'boxes' from the atmosphere, that these should be reduced to 4km in the near future, and that there are long term plans to shrink them to 1km.

The Met Office hopes this will enable it to achieve further improvements in its accuracy, but is not making any projections on the future reduction in the error rate.

Roger Hunt, chief operating officer at the Met Office, said: "We need to continually improve our forecasts to meet the growing expectations of the public and our other customers. The improvements will continue as we produce more and more detailed forecasts in the future."