Improving U.S. Weather Prediction With Petascale Supercomputing

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Over at the Washington Post, Jason Samenow writes that an infusion of funding into the National Weather Service from Hurricane Sandy relief legislation promises to facilitate massive upgrades to key supercomputers, dramatically improving local, national, and global weather forecasts.

This is a breakthrough moment for the National Weather Service and the entire U.S. weather enterprise in terms of positioning itself with the computing capacity and more sophisticated models we’ve all been waiting for,” said Louis Uccellini, director of the National Weather Service.

The $23.7 million in improvements to NWS’s forecasting systems from the Sandy supplemental will facilitate a more than ten-fold increase in the capacity of the supercomputer running the GFS model, ramping compute capacity from 213 teraflops to 2,600 teraflops by the 2015 fiscal year. Read the Full Story.