Met Office and Microsoft join forces to build world’s most powerful weather and climate forecasting supercomputer in UK
The Met Office has signed a multimillion-pound agreement with Microsoft for the provision of a world-leading supercomputing capability that will take weather and climate forecasting to the next level and help the UK stay safe and thrive, announced today on Earth Day.
This new supercomputer – expected to be the world’s most advanced dedicated to weather and climate – will be in the top 25 supercomputers in the world and be twice as powerful as any other in the UK.
The data it generates will be used to provide more accurate warnings of severe weather, helping to build resilience and protect the UK population, businesses and infrastructure from the impacts of increasingly extreme storms, floods and snow.
It will also be used to take forward ground-breaking climate change modelling, unleashing the full potential of the Met Office’s global expertise in climate science. The precision and accuracy of its modelling will help to inform Government policy as part of the UK’s fight against climate change, and its efforts to reach net zero by 2050.
It follows the announcement by Government in February 2020 which committed £1.2 billion of funding to develop this state-of-the-art supercomputer.
Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng said: “This partnership between the Met Office and Microsoft to build the world’s most powerful weather and climate forecasting supercomputer is a ringing endorsement for the UK’s credentials in protecting our environment, as we prepare to host COP26 later this year.
“The new supercomputer, backed by a billion pound UK government investment, will act as a catalyst for unlocking new skills, technologies and jobs right across our economy – from data scientists to AI experts – all as part of our efforts to build back better and create a cleaner future.”
Once up and running in Summer 2022, the new supercomputer will help ensure government, industry and communities are better prepared for severe weather and our changing climate through more detailed models combined with an increased number of model scenarios and growing amounts of environmental and social data will mean that forecasts and projections for risk-based planning will be significantly improved. One example of how this will be used is in creating very detailed city scale simulations to provide localised climate information to improve city design, such as public transport infrastructure.
Ther will be better forecasting of local-scale weather using very high-resolution simulations that can be quickly turned on in an area where severe weather is forecast. This will enhance emergency preparedness to local storms, heavy rain and flooding while there will be increased access to ever greater amounts of weather and climate data, providing businesses with new opportunities to innovate and create new services based on this information.
Penny Endersby, Chief Executive, Met Office, said: “We are delighted to be working in collaboration with Microsoft to deliver our next supercomputing capability. Working together we will provide the highest quality weather and climate datasets and ever more accurate forecasts that enable decisions to allow people to stay safe and thrive. This will be a unique capability which will keep not just the Met Office, but the UK at the forefront of environmental modelling and high-performance computing.
“This investment by the UK government is a great vote of confidence in the Met Office’s world-leading status as a provider of weather and climate science and services as well as in our national commitment to build a more resilient world in a changing climate, helping build back greener across the UK and beyond.”
Clare Barclay, Chief Executive Officer, Microsoft UK, said: “The Met Office has long been synonymous with excellence and innovation in our understanding of the impact of weather and climate. To make progress with the ecological challenges we face requires innovation, technology and partnerships. The potential of the deep expertise, data gathering capacity and historical archive of the Met Office, combined with the sheer scale and power of supercomputing on Microsoft Azure will mean we can improve forecasting, help tackle climate change and ensure the UK remains at the forefront of climate science for decades to come.”
