Met Office supercomputer caught in environmental storm

Met Office weather prediction supercomputer blows up a storm

The Met Office's Exeter headquarters has been identified as one of the worst sources of carbon dioxide pollution for a public building - thanks to the IBM supercomputer it uses to help tackle climate change.

The building houses the Met Office's weather prediction supercomputer, whose presence is reputed to produce 12,000 tons of CO2 indirectly through the power required to keep it operating.

Met Office spokesman Barry Gromett told the BBC that most of the building had an excellent green rating.

"Our supercomputer is vital for predictions of weather and climate change, but by failing to discriminate between office and supercomputing facilities the process reflects badly on the entire Met Office site," he said.

The Department of Communities and Local Government's green league table of public buildings shows the Met Office headquarters building narrowly failing to reach the top 100 – it was 103rd in the list of 28,259 buildings.

Number one on the list was Manchester University's Oxford Road campus, while the Royal London Hospital beat Scarborough Sports Centre for second place.

The £30m IBM system used by the Met Office has had a slightly controversial year, as its weather predictions were adjusted earlier in the summer after its April prediction for a "barbecue summer".

The Met Office recently signed a contract with IBM for a new System-p model supercomputer capable of peak performance of 125 trillion floating point operations per second (flops). By 2011 the system will have a performance approaching one petaflop (1,000 trillion flops).