UK Prepares £1.2B for Weather Forecasting Supercomputer

With climate change and weather being one of the most pressing subjects for governments worldwide at the moment, it’s pretty clear that being able to successfully predict weather patterns in advance could not only help prepare better responses but also could help authorities take more pre-emptive action.

In a report via TechPowerUp, however, it seems that the UK is looking to be one of the world-leaders in this field. With £1.2B allocated, the UK is looking to build what could potentially be the world’s strongest weather-predicting supercomputer ever built!

UK to Build £1.2B Weather Supercomputer

Currently, the UK utilizes three Cray XC40 supercomputers. Systems that are capable of achieving a maximum of 14 PetaFLOPs at peak performance. A pretty hefty number, but in supercomputer terms, a little behind the times. With the new design, however, they intend to see a colossally huge improvement on this.

Specifically, they hope that the new supercomputer will be 6 times more powerful. A factor which, by proxy, could improve results and predictive skills by up to 20 times the current value.

What Do We Think?

With the UK recently being battered by two storms in very quick succession, you only have to turn on the news to see the impact it has had across the country.

While a supercomputer couldn’t stop this from happening, as we said earlier, it could at least potentially allow us to know much more detail around them before they actually hit our shores. And maybe, who knows, could actually allow for some preventative or pre-emptive action to be taken.

What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!