New $30 Million Supercomputer Provides Better Weather Forecasts

In Australia, accurate forecasts that not only predict the weekend weather but the temperature the following weekend as well will be available by mid-year on a $30 million supercomputer at the Melbourne Bureau of Meteorology. The new computer, now being installed, will be capable of 1.8 trillion computations per second, allowing more accurate models of the atmosphere that could push the current four day forecast out to seven or eight days. The bureau's high performance computing centre manager, Philip Tannenbaum, said information on temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction, and pressure from around the world were put into the bureau's models. "The weather models do a numerical simulation of the atmosphere as a result of this. It includes the sun shining through clouds, reflecting off the land or off the water, chemical contaminants in the air, and the effect that has on radiation," he said. "It's an extraordinarily complex, computationally intensive simulation system."