The Met Workplace has transferred to a brand new off-site supercomputer – which might make 14-day forecasts as correct as seven-day equivalents.
Working utilizing Microsoft’s cloud-based Azure system, the brand new pc might additionally assist predict excessive climate additional prematurely and advance local weather analysis.
The climate company used its first supercomputer 60 years in the past, however till now it has nearly all the time been run on website.
For greater than a month, Azure has been working off-site concurrently with the Met Workplace’s earlier supercomputer, which has now been switched off.
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Chief govt officer Penny Endersby stated on the company’s web site that “a big change like this is like changing the engines when you’re flying over the Atlantic” – noting that the brand new pc had already been working in parallel with its outdated system for greater than a month.
“You can never have a stop, which is why we did the long parallel run with the old supercomputer,” she added.
“So, success at this phase is that nobody can tell the difference.”
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The Met Workplace say the Azure-powered pc will make its long run forecasts extra correct. File pic: PA
Charles Ewen, the climate company’s chief data officer, stated the Met Workplace makes use of numerical climate prediction “to predict the future state of the atmosphere” which “takes the laws of physics that are fairly well understood and applies them at scale”.
He added: “To do that is very, very computationally expensive. It’s simulating the future state of the atmosphere.
“Operationally, that is 200 to 300 terabytes of knowledge a day.”
Utilizing Azure, he stated the Met Workplace will be capable to begin contemporary tasks with out having to construct new infrastructure.
Segolene Berthou, head of a analysis workforce engaged on the Met Workplace’s environmental prediction capabilities, added that the supercomputer may also permit for a mannequin to be run a number of occasions with barely totally different parameters.
“The coupled system we’re preparing is running faster and more smoothly on the new supercomputer,” she stated.
