NOAA Ready to Compute Better Weather Forecasts

After nine years and what by today’s government spending standards seems a bargain $180 million, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has completed the installation of its new weather and climate predicting IBM supercomputer, “Stratus.” According to NOAA, Stratus will deliver improved forecast accuracy and extended watch and warning lead times for severe weather, including hurricanes, tornadoes, air quality, wildfires, floods, tsunamis and winter storms.

Four times faster than its predecessor, Stratus can make 69.7 trillion calculations per second. “Higher computation speed allows meteorologists to rapidly refine and update severe weather forecasts as dangerous weather develops and threatens U.S. communities,” states NOAA in a press release.

In making its forecasts, Stratus considers “billions of bytes” of weather information gathered from around the world every day, including temperature, wind, precipitation, atmospheric pressure. The data is constantly being fed into Stratus from manned and automated observation stations on the ground, in the air, on the sea and in space.

The Stratus “Wow!” factor:

• Stratus’ microprocessors alone contain 2,000 miles of copper wiring, enough to stretch from Washington, D.C. to the Grand Canyon.

• It would take one person with a calculator 3 million years to tabulate the number of calculations that Stratus can perform in a single second.

• Stratus would fit on half a tennis court.

• Stratus is 34 times more powerful than the most powerful supercomputer in existence a decade ago.

Established in 1970, NOAA is the nation’s official clearinghouse for weather-related information, including forecasts and storm warnings, as well as a range of services from charting U.S. waterways to studying global climate change.

Also See: Extreme Climate Changes Coming Soon, NOAA Warns (2008)

Follow US Government Info On Twitter