Met Office supercomputers slash weather errors

An upgrade to the Met Office’s supercomputing system has cut error rates for weather forecasts by 11 per cent over the past year.

A spokesperson said it had achieved an 11 per cent reduction in the error rate for its predictions for the northern hemisphere.

This follows the installation of an NEC SX-6 supercomputer in spring 2004, and compares with an average error reduction rate of 3 per cent in the other five major weather modelling centres in Canada, France, Germany, Japan and the US.

On a global basis, the Met Office has achieved a 6 per cent reduction in the error rate.

The supercomputer has provided a six-fold increase in processing capacity compared with the old model, and enabled the Met Office to use models with a finer resolution to predict the weather.

On 12 April 2005, it began to use a new supercomputer with even more processing nodes: the NEC SX-8. The spokesperson said it is working on a model that uses 12km 'boxes' from the atmosphere, that these should be reduced to 4km in the near future, and that there are long term plans to shrink them to 1km.

The Met Office hopes this will enable it to achieve further improvements in its accuracy, but is not making projections on any future reduction in the error rate.

Roger Hunt, chief operating officer at the Met Office, said: "We need to continually improve our forecasts to meet the growing expectations of the public and our other customers. The improvements will continue as we produce more and more detailed forecasts in the future."