According to the Met Office, the organization will purchase a $156M Cray XC40TM supercomputer, one of the fastest machines on the planet. Comprised of 480,000 cores, 2M gigs of memory and 17 gigabytes of storage the XC40 will blaze through 16 trillion floating point calculations a second—good enough to establish the machine as the world’s 4th fastest supercomputer.
Armed with their new computational behemoth climate scientists and meteorologists will attempt to improve hourly weather forecasts by reaching deep into data, producing weather maps with a resolution no wider than 300m (984ft). With an accumulation of hyper-local forecasts researchers expect to build a strong foundation from which precise, long term weather projections can be made.
"I have been eager to make this happen for some time,” remarked Greg Clark, the UK’s Universities, Science and Cities Minister. “I am confident that the supercomputer will make this nation more resilient and better prepared for high impact weather … improving lives up and down the country."
In addition to a better understanding of local and global climate the Met Office projects that some $3.2B worth of economic benefits will trickle-down from their machine’s calculations. With better weather predictions it’s expected that airports will run smoother, infrastructure will be developed more effectively and the cost of climate change-related events will be mitigated.
Source: The Met Office