NAL To Build New Weather Forecasting Machine

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The National Aerospace Laboratories, an arm of India’s Council of Scientific and Industrial Research [CSIR], has announced plans to construct the country’s most powerful supercomputer dedicated to to forecasting localized weather phenomena.  The rough technical specs have put the machine around 10 TFlops.  This is ten times more powerful than the current machine, a Cray, at the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting [NCMRWF] in Noida.

Because it (will be) faster, it will also bring down the time (required for weather) forecast,” said R.C. Bhatia, former chief of the India Meteorological Department, or IMD, the agency that disseminates weather forecasts.

The goal of the entire project is two fold: increase the accuracy of the medium range forecasts and shorten the turn-around for disseminating a completed forecast.  The group is hoping to be able to predict unusual phenomena such as the July 2005 downpour than flooded Mumbai.

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