Bureau of Meteorology’s new supercomputer will help emergency services

AUSTRALIANS will be able to better prepare for extreme weather events with the purchase of a new supercomputer by the Bureau of Meteorology.

IBM MareNostrum supercomputer in chapel at Polytechnical University in Barcelona, Spain 12 Apr 2005. super computer /Computers

AUSTRALIANS will be able to better prepare for extreme weather events with the purchase of a new supercomputer by the Bureau of Meteorology.

The machine will enable the bureau to forecast extreme weather events in finer detail, allowing it to predict changes in wind direction to assist fire fighters or better track cyclone paths. It will have the power of 25,000 desktop computers and will transmit at 10,000 times faster than the average home broadband speed.

The Abbott government allocated funding for the new technology in the budget, but is withholding costings due to the commercial sensitivity of the tender process.

However, it is expected to cost “many, many tens of millions of dollars,” parliamentary secretary to the minister for the environment Simon Birmingham told a Senate estimates committee on Monday.

The machine will allow the bureau to produce models every hour - rather than every six hours currently - and enable staff to create specific models for individual weather events.

“So whether we’ve got cyclones, floods, fires, thunderstorms or volcanic ash events to the north happening, we’ll be able to set the model to run a specialised, on-demand forecast for emergency services,” BOM director of meteorology Rob Vertessy told the committee.

The new technology, which will operate for five years from mid-2016, replaces the old machine and will be housed in a data centre with “very high” physical and energy security.

Accurate weather forecasting is vital to environmentally-sensitive sectors that produce 3.4 per cent of the nation’s GDP and is used to ensure the safety of 1.7 million passenger movements per week in aviation, the committee was told.