UK weather forecast more accurate with Met Office supercomputer

The Met Office has unveiled a new supercomputer which it says produces better forecasts.

The weather agency says detailed estimates up to 14 days in advance will become the norm, while rainfall predictions will also be more accurate.

The new cloud-based system, which was launched on Monday, can perform 60 quadrillion calculations per second.

It is being operated by Microsoft's cloud-based Azure, making it the first system the Met Office is not running by itself.

And it ends a long wait for the weather prediction tech, which was first announced in 2020 and originally slated for 2022.

According to the Met Office, this is the world's first cloud-based supercomputer dedicated to weather and climate science.

It said one of the benefits of the tech will be improving forecasting at airports, while it could also give the energy sector more detailed information to help it plan for potential blackouts and surges.

And it said the supercomputer, which is entirely powered by renewable energy, will also improve predications on ongoing challenges caused by climate change, such as flooding and wildfires.

The new supercomputer, which can perform more than four times the number of calculations per second than its predecessor, contains 1.8m core processors.

While the exact location of the infrastructure is a secret, the Azure supercomputing service is physically located in the south of England and is split across two data centres.

After recent hacks of British institutions such as M&S and Co-op, cyber security is on "everyone's thoughts" according to the Met Office's chief information officer Charles Ewen.

But he said he is happy with the security of the new system and is "very confident this is a big enhancement" on its predecessor.

"There's never been a more critical time for weather and climate intelligence," said Prof Simon Vosper, the Met Office's science director.

"We know the climate's changing, as we know the risks of hazardous weather.

"The supercomputer will unlock our ability to deliver those improved services where they're needed."

In February 2020, the UK government pledged £1.2bn for the project and said the old supercomputers would reach the end of their lives in 2022.

Mr Ewen said the three-year delay was predominantly caused by the Covid pandemic and its impact on the availability of silicon, while the Met Office highlighted the need to keep delivering existing services during the changeover.

"I'm very confident the Met Office is best placed in the world to be able to accommodate at scale emerging methods and techniques such as artificial intelligence," he said.

Microsoft's Azure cloud computing service is one of the largest providers of data centres in the world, and powers a large part of artificial intelligence infrastructure.

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