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MET ÉIREANN IS joining forces with national weather services in Denmark, Iceland and the Netherlands to jointly operate a new supercomputer that will bring significant advancements to short-term weather forecasting.
With global temperatures projected to increase further over the next decades, weather patterns are expected to become more extreme and more challenging to forecast, Met Éireann has said.
The United Weather Centres-West collaboration is a scientific and technical response to this challenge, with four countries jointly operating a supercomputer that will allow more timely and accurate weather forecasts and warnings to help protect life and property.
Planned to be operational by early 2023, the new supercomputer will provide high-resolution weather forecasts that will be used to:
Modern weather forecasting is based on Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) which requires vast amounts of data from weather observations, atmospheric conditions and satellite imagery, as well as significant processing power only available through High Performance Computing (HPC).
By combining national resources, it is aimed that the new UWC-West supercomputer will represent a huge leap in weather forecasting capabilities to each country.
It will perform 4,000 trillion calculations per second and handle millions of weather observations every 24 hours – this will produce detailed weather forecasts every hour, which is especially critical ahead of severe weather.
“The UWC-West supercomputer is the first step in a powerful collaboration between weather services in Europe which will allow Ireland to meet the growing challenge of forecasting high impact weather events with much greater confidence,” Met Éireann director Eoin Moran said.
“Our countries have a long history of working together in weather prediction research. Denmark, The Netherlands, Iceland and Ireland bound the North East Atlantic Area and are now combining resources to best predict the weather that impacts this region,” Moran said.
“This is particularly important in the context of the influence of climate change on the predictably of weather systems as the new supercomputer will allow for the incorporation of the most up to date weather forecasting methodologies.”
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“Met Eireann to ask three countries if they can use their supercomputer when it’s created”.
@Larry Whack: no, its a collaboration of the four met bodies. You might have a reread of the article.
@Larry Whack: You didn’t read it, did you?
And it will still be more accurate to just look out of the window….
@Jane Alford: so looking out the window this-morning let’s you know what the weather will likely be in 2 days time? Man, whatever business you’re in, you should change career to weather forecasting, with accuracy that you claim to have, this time next year, you’ll be a millionaire.
@Alan Wright: It won’t, but then neither will Met Eireann, so you know…
Just another tool to blame when they get it wrong……
@Nora McElhinney: they get it wrong? Hmm never noticed. They always seem on point
@Nora McElhinney: Uncommon enough.
You’re maybe confusing them with the British School of Fish, who notoriously downplayed the impact of the great 1987 storm.
Long overdue
Weather is going to be sh1 te for the next few months. No need to be spending money on computing machines to find that out
@Quiet Goer: That’s winter for you. We should all hibernate really.
What a great opportunity to collaborate in the HPC arena, Ireland has a hugely underdeveloped role to play and this is something we can really make an impact on. We already know that we have the best weather and, I have absolutely no doubt, we can also nurture our own talent in the high performance technology field.
@Tom Hogarty: You sound just like Stephen Donnelly lol
And we’ll still get “clear spells with scattered showers” as the standard forecast
“Computer says no” sun
I hope they’re not using the same supercomputer used for the Dublin Bus Real Time data
@Neil Curran: that’s not a supercomputer it’s an old 386 PC running on dos
“it’s gonna rain Wednesday fortnight”
Met Eireann = haven’t a clue. Com
@Mick Dunne: cluless n0nsense
@Mick Dunne: How so?
@Mick Dunne: Says somebody who possibly doesn’t know the wind direction in an anti cyclone.
Will it run Crysis?
@Ken Loughman: haha, underrated comment.
@TomTraubert: An oldie but goldie!
Oh no, not SKYNET!
Let’s hope it’s a HAL9000.
Jean Byrne : Can you give me tomorrow’s forecast for the Dublin area HAL?
HAL : I’m afraid I can’t do that Jean.
@GrumpyAulFella: Close enough – it’s a Cray supercomputer.
Mind you, that was the Jurassic Park system :-)
Scorchio!
You wud imagine that they wud have been doin dis up to dis point
@david byrne: doin what?
@Gavin Conran: what wud u think gavin …what’s the article about …let’s use d mind …
Rainy with a chance of meatballs…
Can they forecast if we’re going to have a “White Christmas “ in December 2021!?
Met Eireann are very inaccurate a lot of the time. I was off last week in October, and the weather predicted rain all day in all counties the Wednesday and the Friday. The weather couldnt have been nicer both of those days
Desperate when that happens, you wouldn’t know what to wear. Try the Norwegian site YR.no – if you put an area name into it, it’s surprisingly accurate within the week.
have your say