Met Office buys super computer

The people that so famously bring us the weather have bought themselves a £33 million super computer from IBM.

This will be used to forecast the weather and predict the effects of climate change.

Once the computer is online, which at the moment is estimated to be sometime in 2009, it will be able to run a maximum of one hundred and twenty five trillion floating operations per second, making it the second most powerful computer in the UK.

The most powerful is also a weather forecasting machine, for the European Centre of Medium Range Weather Forecasts.

So clearly, this should mean that they will never get the weather wrong again, right? Well not exactly.

Apparently, according to the Met Office, it is impossible to predict with 100% accuracy the long-range weather forecast.

That makes a change, but at least the computer will look good!

Story link: Met Office buys super computer