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Photos: Supercomputers signal when storms are a-brewing
Keeping one step ahead of mother nature

By Nick Heath

Published: Friday 06 June 2008

ECMWF's two IBM supercomputers chew up more than 20 million bits of climate data every day to produce their predictions.

The centre constantly feeds air pressure, temperature, wind speed and other data into its machines to generate its virtual model of the atmosphere.

Some of the reams of daily data, which generates about 500 million numbers every 12 hours, can be seen here on charts showing air pressure and temperature.

Since it started in 1975 ECMWF's climate model has evolved from simply simulating atmospheric data to recreating its interaction with animals and plants, land, ocean and ice.

As computing power burgeoned and satellite data has improved predictions have steadily increased in accuracy over the decades, with seven-day forecasts in Europe today having a better hit rate than five day forecasts in the early 1980s.

Global forecasts are sent out twice a day to the National Meteorological Services of ECMWF member and co-operating states, including the Met Office.

Photo credit: Nick Heath