NWS Announces Big Computer Upgrade

riverat1 writes "After being embarrassed when the Europeans did a better job forecasting Sandy than the National Weather Service Congress allocated $25 million ($23.7 after sequestration) in the Sandy relief bill for upgrades to forecasting and supercomputer resources. The NWS announced that their main forecasting computer will be upgraded from the current 213 TeraFlops to 2,600 TFlops by fiscal year 2015, over a twelve-fold increase. The upgrade is expected to increase the horizontal grid scale by a factor of 3 allowing more precise forecasting of local features of weather. The some of the allocated funds will also be used to hire some contract scientists to improve the forecast model physics and enhance the collection and assimilation of data."

Comments

Re:so..

[BRock97]

Why not just pay attention to the European forecasts, which would cost nothing?

Actually, the NWS pays a great deal of money to see the ECMWF (the European model of choice) and are required to encrypt it before it is sent out to the various forecast offices over their NOAAPort system.

Re:I would start looking at the algorithms

[Shinobi]

It's not just once. Several hurricanes and other severe weather systems have been most accurately predicted by the European model. In fact, if you read some of the links in the article, you'll see references to that.