Supercomputers to help predict weather

Bloomberg

India’s ability to predict the sort of devastating deluge that struck Mumbai last week is set to get a major boost next year.
The heaviest rainfall since 2005 killed a dozen people in India’s financial capital, disrupted stock and bond trading and halted a suburban train network that carries about 8 million people a day. Local residents and civic authorities struggled to cope as most roads were submerged and commuters waded through waist-deep floodwater.
While the India Meteorological Department accurately predicted the heavy rain for the broader Mumbai region and its sprawling suburbs, its capacity to forecast rain in a small geographical area should improve drastically by the middle of next year when the government installs two more supercomputers and a suite of new radars. That’ll give it the same forecasting power as the UK, US and Australia’s, according to the man responsible for the 142-year-old weather office.
“That will help us make more probabilistic forecast for actual rainfall in a particular area,” K. J. Ramesh, director general of India Meteorological Department said in an interview in New Delhi. “We will also need to work on our forecasting models to improve them.”
The supercomputers will boost the department’s data processing capacity by more than 6 times. The agency is also adding more Doppler radars that measure the velocity of clouds and winds and has approached the Indian Space Research Organisation to install more weather monitoring equipment on satellites.