Met Office feels wind of change

The Met Office is spending £27.5m on a next generation supercomputer that will increase the accuracy of weather forecasting.

The supercomputer will be installed by NEC in a phased approach over the next three years, at the Met Office's new headquarters in Exeter.

By March 2004 a supercomputer made up of NEC SX-6 nodes will be up and running. By March 2005, more nodes will be added, completing the project and providing 12-and-a-half-times the computing power generated by the Met Office's two existing Cray T3E computers.

Alan Dickinson, director of numerical weather prediction at the Met Office said the additional computing power will enable the government department to provide far more sophisticated weather forecasts and climate predictions.

'The upgrade will allow us to use higher resolution models with more computational and physical processing, enabling us to get more accurate forecasts of both near, current weather and longer-term climate trends,' he said.

NEC will install 240 processors of the SX-6 Series in parallel. Each has peak vector performance of 8 Teraflops, the fastest technical processor available, according to NEC.

'This deal gives a clear statement about the Met Office's commitment to remain the acknowledged world leader in both numerical weather prediction and prediction of climate change over the coming years,' Dickinson said.