National Weather Service to massively upgrade modeling computers

Ars Technica : On Monday, the National Weather Service (NWS) announced a $44.5 million upgrade to its weather-modeling supercomputers. Currently, the organization’s two computers perform at just 426 megaflops (million floating-point operations per second). By October, the goal is to reach 5 petaflops. The NWS hopes that the upgrade will help improve its modeling and forecasting capabilities. In 2012, the NWS forecast model fell short when it predicted, a week before Hurricane Sandy struck, that the storm would more likely head into the Atlantic than come ashore. In comparison, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts accurately predicted that the hurricane would make landfall. It took three days for the NWS model to converge with that correct prediction. Improved modeling computers would likely have given the affected cities and their residents more time to prepare for the storm.