Met Éireann among four countries set to operate new climate forecasting supercomputer

Met Éireann is teaming up with national weather services in Iceland, The Netherlands and Denmark to jointly operate a new supercomputer that will vastly improve weather forecasting and help communities become more resilient to climate change.

With global temperatures predicted to increase further over the coming years, weather patters are expected to be come more extreme and difficult to predict.

Due to be operational by 2023, the "High-Performance Computer" built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise will preform 4,000 trillion calculations per second and handle millions of weather observations every 24 hours.

The supercomputer, which will be located in Reykjavik, Iceland, will also enable the agricultural sector to make earlier and better informed decisions to protect and manage their crops and livestock along with providing more accurate information to marine communities as well as improving transport safety.

Speaking to Morning Ireland Director of Met Éireann Eoin Moran said the contract for the computer is being signed today and the machine should be delivered in the middle of next year, after which an elaborate and rigorous testing process will commence.

The collaboration between Met Éireann, Icelandic Meteorological Office, the Danish Meteorological Institute, and the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, is part of the "United Weather Centres-West" initiative, and a broader collaboration between ten national weather services in Europe, known as United Weather Centres (UWC), which plans to operate the common multi-national weather forecasting system by the end of the decade.