NOAA Bets Forecasting Success on Supercomputers
August 30, 2013
Early fall, as hurricane season begins, is the time when many Americans start to closely follow weather reports.
Because predicting the strength and movement of huge storm systems that bring destruction and death is of crucial importance, meteorologists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have invested in supercomputers that allow for better predictions up to as six days in advance of a storm's arrival.
Hurricane Sandy, which hit the U.S. East Coast in October last year, was the second costliest storm in U.S. history — causing widespread damage and killing 285 people. At the time, some blamed meteorologists for not accurately predicting the path of the storm.
But according to Ben Kyger, Director of Central Operations at NOAA's College Park headquarters, weather forecasting is extremely difficult.
"You’ve got major patterns in the atmosphere, like the jet stream, but you’ve also got little eddies, little currents, little things happening all over the place," he said. "All these little changes are interacting with each other, continuously, all day long. So if you look at it from above, from a satellite, you see the atmosphere moving and churning in big ways and little ways."
Oceans, he says, are another factor because they closely interact with the atmosphere and have a huge effect on storms. In order to improve reliability of its forecasts, NOAA spent about $20 million on two new supercomputers that started building models of the weather patterns on July 25.
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