| Weather Forecasting | ||
| Some of the world's most powerful computers are used to
forecast the weather. Accuracy of forecasts is improving all the time
and many people rely on these forecasts - TV
companies, shipping, farmers, the military etc...
The computer systems are also used for hurricane and tornado tracking, global warming monitoring, ocean monitoring (eg El Nino). |
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Data collection.
Millions of pieces of data (observations such as temperature, pressure, humidity, infra-red radiation) are collected from
All these readings are sent to the Met. Office computer systems at Bracknell. Thermometers - measure temperature |
Billions of readings are collected
daily which cover the whole Earth.
The computer system at Bracknell is linked through networks to meteorological systems in other countries. |
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| Hardware
The Meteorological Office computer is a Cray T3E supercomputer. It uses parallel processing and has over 700 processors. It is capable of very fast processing.
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| Processing
The data is stored in a large database. The first task is to perform a quality control check on the data (validation) and to reject all invalid readings. The data is formatted to fit in with a numerical 'Unified Model' of readings. From this computer model, forecasts can be made. The bulk of processing is 'number-crunching' and solving thousands of inter-related equations. The computer can also produce global and local charts of weather information.
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Thank goodness - we do not
need to learn about the Unified Model - it is very complex!
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| Software
At the Met. Office in Bracknell, the complex software which processes the readings has been written in Fortran and a user-friendly GUI has been added.
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