The Met Office has reached another major milestone in its supercomputing programme, delivering the world’s first fully managed cloud supercomputing service for weather and climate science now in operational use.
The programme has been delivered in phases to protect the continuity of the UK’s national forecasting services. The first phase provided a stable, like-for-like operational replacement for the previous supercomputer, with phase two substantially increasing the computing power available for forecasting, climate research and scientific development.
The Met Office has also switched to its new cloud-based Managed Archive Storage System (MASS), replacing the previous archive based in Exeter. The archive underpins operational forecasting, research and development and has been designed to support the significant future growth in weather and climate data generated by increasingly advanced simulations.
The new forecasting platform provides the Met Office with vast computing power to process huge amounts of weather and climate data at speed. Using around 1.8 million processor cores, it can carry out approximately 60 quadrillion calculations every second. Each day, the system processes more than 50 billion weather observations, supporting the forecasts, warnings and climate services used across the UK.
The programme represents a major transformation of the UK’s national weather and climate capability. By combining Met Office scientific expertise with Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure and operational capability, it provides a reliable and resilient platform for weather forecasting and climate science.
Met Office Chief Data and Information Officer, Charles Ewen, said: “This is a major achievement for the Met Office and the UK. Our new supercomputing capability underpins the forecasts, warnings and climate information that help people, businesses and public services make better decisions.
“Its scale allows us to process tens of billions of weather observations every day, conduct increasingly sophisticated scientific modelling and provide reliable services around the clock. This major operational milestone provides a strong foundation for further improvements to weather forecasting, climate science and the services that help the UK stay safe and thrive.”
Delivering value across the UK
The programme is on track to deliver £11.3 billion in socioeconomic benefits to the UK, supporting government, businesses and communities through improved weather and climate services.
The benefits are being delivered across sectors including aviation, defence and land transport. The capability also supports severe weather warnings, emergency response, flood forecasting, energy resilience and climate adaptation.
By providing better weather and climate information, the platform helps government, businesses and public services manage risks, reduce disruption and strengthen the UK’s resilience to severe weather and a changing climate.
More resilient and energy efficient
Moving the Met Office’s national forecasting platform to a Microsoft-managed cloud service has improved the reliability and resilience of the platform. . The managed service also gives the Met Office access to Microsoft’s 24-hour operational capability, engineering expertise and security practices, allowing Met Office specialists to focus on science, services and customer outcomes.
Supporting weather and climate science
The enhanced computing capability is improving how weather and climate models represent rainfall and other atmospheric processes, while allowing more observational data to be used in producing forecasts.
It also supports next-generation climate modelling at higher resolutions and with much larger ensembles. This will help scientists improve understanding of climate processes, identify near-term weather and climate hazards and provide more useful climate information to support policy, adaptation and resilience planning.