NOAA's Take on 'Cloud Computing'

It may seem as if weather forecasters are more often wrong than they are right, but the Commerce Department's National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration is hoping to change that by installing a new supercomputer for weather and climate prediction.

NOAA installed two new supercomputers -- naming the primary system "Stratus," and its backup "Cirrus" -- which marked the end of the final phase of a nine-year, $180 million contract. The systems will provide more sophisticated models of the earth's land, ocean and atmosphere, which will help meteorologists improve the accuracy of forecasts and extend watch and warning lead times for severe weather, according to the agency's press release.

The new supercomputers are four times faster than the previous system and can make 69.7 trillion calculations per second, enabling meteorologists to quickly update severe forecasts as weather develops. According to the release, billions of bytes of weather observations are fed into the system each day, including temperature, wind, precipitation, atmospheric pressure, and other oceanographic and satellite information taken from the ground, air, sea and space.

Here are some other facts about Stratus, courtesy of NOAA:

• Microprocessors contain 2,000 miles of copper wiring, enough to stretch from Washington, D.C. to the Grand Canyon.
• It would take one person with a calculator 3 million years to tabulate the number of calculations that can be performed in a single second.
• Stratus would fit in 1/2 the size of a tennis court.
• Stratus is 34 times more powerful than the most powerful supercomputer in existence a decade ago.