National Weather Service Upgrading System, Promises ‘More Accurate, Reliable Forecasts’

The National Weather Service is increasing it's supercomputing capacity which it says will allow them to provide "more timely, accurate, reliable, and detailed forecasts".

The changes are expected to be completed by October 2015.

The capacity of their two supercomputers will each jump to 2.5 petaflops. That's a total of 5 petaflops, which is nearly ten times more than the current capacity.

Peta-whats?

Louis Uccellini, Ph.D., Director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Weather Service said, "By increasing our overall capacity, we’ll be able to process quadrillions of calculations per second that all feed into our forecasts and predictions. This boost in processing power is essential as we work to improve our numerical prediction models for more accurate and consistent forecasts required to build a Weather Ready Nation.”

Weather Ready Nations and petaflops don't come cheap. The increase in capacity will cost $44.5 million.