The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, has switched on two new supercomputers that should make weather forecasts increasingly accurate. We'll be seeing the effects this hurricane season.
NOAA's two new supercomputers can each handle 213 trillion calculations per second. Compared to what NOAA was running last week it's, "roughly a tripling of power", according to Ben Kyger from NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Prediction.The new super computers will help predict weather models further into the future and with more accuracy. But hurricane modeling is one of the biggest beneficiaries.
The supercomputers are already running a model called the HWRF, one of the most important hurricane models for the National Hurricane Center. Because of the increased computing power, that model has jumped 15% in accuracy for both hurricane tracking and hurricane intensity.
"And intensity is particularly hard to improve in hurricane models", said Kyger. "So 15% is just huge."
The new computers will also be able to incorporate real-time data collected by NOAA's hurricane hunting aircraft.