The U.S. National Weather Service gets big computing boost

The U.S. National Weather Service is getting a quantum jump in computing power that will significantly improve its forecasting and storm tracking abilities to better protect the country from severe weather.

"This is a game changer," Louis Uccellini, who took over as director of the National Weather Service in February, told Reuters in an interview, calling it "the biggest increase in operational capacity that we've ever had."

The Weather Services' global and national weather prediction efforts have long been hampered by aging technology and a lack of computer power to support day-to-day operations. But Uccellini said that was all due to change through upgrades of its IBM system that will give it more than 25 times the computer power it has today.

Over the next two years, the results should be apparent through enhancements across the whole range of products and services the Weather Service produces, focusing on everything from routine weather to tornadoes and hurricanes to floods, droughts and blizzards.

With the U.S. economy vulnerable to severe weather events that can cost billions of dollars a year, the boost in computing power is sure to come as good news to many, especially given concerns that climate change is fueling more extreme weather.

That includes millions of people living in hurricane danger zones and U.S. oil and gas producers in the Gulf of Mexico, which is frequently threatened by tropical cyclones.

But the National Weather Service lost its leadership in computer modeling years ago, especially when it comes to medium-range projections, and Uccellini acknowledged as much in his comments to Reuters.

Performance measures consistently show the United States trailing the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) when it comes to providing the most accurate global forecasting model, he said.

"They are the No. 1 model, there's no question about that," Uccellini said.

Computer models, which help meteorologists develop forecasts, simulate how weather conditions might develop based on an initial set of atmospheric and oceanic conditions. The highest resolution models, which can tie up huge amounts of supercomputing resources, pick up on more fine-grain details and tend to produce the most accurate predictions.

"A whole string of model improvements and enhancements" would be made possible through the increase in the Weather Service's computing power, Uccellini said, adding that the U.S. goal was to catch up with the Reading, England-based ECMWF, and ultimately to surpass it in modeling skill.

"For the first time that I recall, we will actually have computers that are bigger than the European center and we'll be running our models at higher resolution than they're running with improved physics packages and improved data assimilation," he said.

"Our goal is to exceed, to be second to none," Uccellini said.
But he said the increase in the Weather Service's computing power marked "a big advance" nonetheless.

"It's definitely a big positive. There's plenty else wrong in the Weather Service and NOAA, don't get me wrong. But this is certainly going to help a lot," Mass said.

A Weather Service spokesman, citing budget constraints, said creating a formal advisory committee may be difficult but called the report positive overall. "We see the study as reaffirming and supportive of our strategic plan, goals and vision of creating a Weather-Ready Nation," spokesman Christopher Vaccaro said in an email statement to Reuters.

The National Academy of Sciences highlighted many perceived shortcomings in the Weather Service in a hallmark report last year, which said it had been "lax in implementing changes."