Computing the weather

A big upgrade to the National Weather Service at NOAA:

NOAA�s National Weather Service more than doubles computing capacity
Whizzing through 213 trillion calculations per second, newly upgraded supercomputers of NOAA�s National Weather Service are now more than twice as fast in processing sophisticated computer models to provide more accurate forecasts further out in time. And as the hurricane season ramps up, forecasters will be armed with an enhanced hurricane model that will improve track and intensity forecasts.

A bit more:

Nicknamed �Tide,� the supercomputer in Reston, Va., and its Orlando-based backup named �Gyre,� are operating with 213 teraflops (TF) � up from the 90 TF with the computers that preceded them. This higher processing power allows the National Weather Service to implement an enhanced Hurricane Weather Research and Forecasting (HWRF) model.

"These forecasting advances can save lives,� said U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, who helped get funding to add even more capacity to the supercomputer. �It's going to allow for better tracking of life-threatening storms and more accurately predict when and where they'll hit, and with what intensity."

With improved physics and a storm-tracking algorithm, the model has displayed up to a 15 percent improvement in both track and intensity forecasts, compared to last year's version of the model. The upgraded HWRF is also capable of processing real-time data collected from the inner core of a tropical system by the tail Doppler radar attached to NOAA�s P3 hurricane hunter aircraft, data which are expected to produce even greater forecast improvements.

�Next comes the quantum leap,� added Uccellini. Following this round of long-planned upgrades, funding requested in the FY 2014 President�s Budget, in addition to funding provided to NOAA by Congress in the spring of 2013 as part of the Hurricane Sandy emergency supplemental appropriations bill, would increase computing power even further to 1,950 TF by summer 2015. �That gives us the necessary computer power to run an enhanced version of our primary forecast model, the Global Forecast System,� said Uccellini.

Very cool -- there is a lot of parallel computing being done here and the more flops (floating-point mathematical operations) the better.