Supercomputers propel forecasting into a revolutionary phase

France's Meteo-France Upgrades Weather Forecasting with Powerful New Supercomputer

Meteo-France, the French national meteorological service, has partnered with the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts to work on the Copernicus atmosphere monitoring project. The collaboration has led to a significant upgrade in Meteo-France's weather forecasting capabilities, thanks to a new supercomputer provided by Bull, a company under Atos.

The new supercomputer boasts a processing power of one quadrillion floating point operations per second (FLOPS), more than 12 times greater than the previous system. This increased power will enable Meteo-France to run forecasts every hour instead of eight times a day, providing more frequent and up-to-date weather information.

The improved supercomputer will benefit the inhabitants of remote territories such as La Reunion, New Caledonia, and others with high-resolution modelling. The resolution of weather predictions in France has improved from 2.5km to 1.3km, allowing for more accurate short-term forecasts over a two-to-four-day period.

The new system offers benefits in optimizing production and lowering operating costs. Damien Declat, head of HPC global presales and delivery at Atos, states that the benefits of the new system extend beyond Moore's Law improvements in peak performance. The innovative direct liquid cooling system in the new supercomputer allows for up to five times more simulations to be run daily.

The increased computing power will support projects like ensemble forecasting for AROME, an atmospheric modelling system to improve short-range forecasts of severe events. The new configuration will also provide more localized forecasts, which will be particularly beneficial for the aviation industry. Meteo-France aims to support the aviation industry by moving to a resolution of just 500m around larger French airports.

The improvement in forecast accuracy will benefit industries such as aviation, shipping, tourism, and sports events. The organization involved in developing improved weather forecasting and climate modeling for France is the European meteorological satellite agency EUMETSAT, which supports enhanced data gathering through new generations of European weather satellites such as Meteosat Third Generation and Metop-SGA1, offering detailed measurements to improve weather and climate models, enabling better predictions especially of extreme weather events.

The results from the new configuration are more accurate on the impact of climate change for climate modelling for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). By 2018, it will take only 200 seconds to run the entire forecasting model for France with the new supercomputer. The next phase of development will add more computing power to the system, further enhancing Meteo-France's weather forecasting capabilities.