US climate and local weather forecasting is about to get a serious improve. The Nationwide Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) this week flipped on two new supercomputers which might be 3X quicker than the company’s former supercomputing system.
By this fall, the brand new HPE Cray supercomputers ought to ship an enchancment to the US World Forecast System (GFS), a climate forecast mannequin that generates information associated to variables like temperatures, winds, precipitation, soil moisture and atmospheric ozone focus. The brand new system may also assist NOAA prepared its new hurricane forecast mannequin, the Hurricane Evaluation and Forecast System (HAFS). The company needs the HAFS up and operating in time for the 2023 hurricane season.
The enhance in computing energy will assist the US ship extra detailed climate forecasts, additional prematurely — which ought to have financial in addition to security advantages.
“Correct climate and local weather predictions are important to informing public security, supporting native economies, and addressing the specter of local weather change,” US Secretary of Commerce Gina M. Raimondo mentioned in a press release. “Via strategic and sustained investments, the US is reclaiming a worldwide high spot in high-performance computing to offer extra correct and well timed local weather forecasts to the general public.”
The brand new HPE Cray machines, Dogwood and Cactus, are named after the flora native to their respective geographic areas of Manassas, Virginia and Phoenix, Arizona. They’re changing NOAA’s earlier Cray and IBM supercomputers in Reston, Virginia and Orlando, Florida.
Every supercomputer operates at a velocity of 12.1 petaflops. They’re at present ranked because the forty ninth and fiftieth quickest computer systems on the planet by TOP500. Mixed with NOAA’s analysis and improvement supercomputers in West Virginia, Tennessee, Mississippi and Colorado, the supercomputing capability supporting NOAA’s new operational prediction and analysis is now 42 petaflops.
With extra energy, NOAA will have the ability to benefit from the numerous enhancements in forecasting fashions which might be being developed.
