MODELLING AND SIMULATION


Weathering the storm


GEMMA CHURCH FINDS OUT HOW SIMULATION AND MODELLING IS UNLOCKING LONG-TERM, ACCURATE WEATHER AND CLIMATE PREDICTIONS


Things are hotting up in the world of weather and climate forecasting thanks to today’s


highly ambitious projects. Some initiatives are building world-class supercomputing facilities. Others are creating digital twins of the Earth. But what impact does this work have on the world of simulation and modelling? Jon Petch, associate director of weather


science at the Met Office, explained: ‘Climate and weather predictions, produced using supercomputing, are ever-increasing in complexity and size as atmospheric physics develops and new data is captured from earth monitoring systems.’


This is where new supercomputing


facilities and modelling techniques can help. In April, the Met Office signed a multimillion-pound agreement with Microsoft for the provision of a supercomputer to accelerate weather and forecasting in the UK. The supercomputer will be twice as powerful as any other machine in the country. It’s a massive step forward for both UK research and the world of weather and climate prediction. Petch explained: ‘This investment is for a 10- year service delivery and includes two substantial increases in supercomputing capacity through two generations of supercomputing implementations, with a return on investment of around 9:1 - resulting in financial benefits totalling up to £13bn for the UK over its ten-year lifespan.’ ‘Increased capacity will permit an


increase in the detail of both ocean and atmospheric models, allowing a more realistic representation of the large-scale weather systems that drive UK weather,’


32 Scientific Computing World Spring 2021


according to Petch. ‘It will enable ever more localised climate predictions, ensuring infrastructure, housing, transport networks etc, built today, will be safe from the weather impacts of the future.’ Microsoft Azure’s Supercomputing-


as-a-Service will also be used during the project, allowing the Met Office to ‘leverage the best blend of dedicated and public cloud services to provide more accurate predictions to help the UK population and businesses plan daily activities, better prepare for extreme weather, and address the challenges associated with climate change,’ according to a Microsoft spokesperson. ‘We are delighted to be working with the Met Office to deliver what will become the world’s leading climate and weather science supercomputing service. Combining the Met Office’s expertise, data gathering capability and historical archive with the sheer scale and power of supercomputing on Azure will improve forecasting, help monitor and tackle climate change and ensure the UK remains at the forefront of scientific and technological research over the next decade,’ the spokesperson added. The new supercomputing facility will


extend the Met Office’s longer-range predictions, enhancing accuracy and supporting medium-term decision-making for business and industry, and improve its understanding and analysis of climate change, while driving ‘technological innovation by UK business and industry,’ Petch noted. The supercomputer itself will pack a


powerful prediction punch. The Microsoft spokesperson said: ‘The first generation of the supercomputer solution will have a combined total of more than 1.5 million processor cores and over 60 Pflops, otherwise known as 60 quadrillion (60,000,000,000,000,000) calculations per second of aggregate peak computing capacity. Microsoft will also deliver further upgrades in computing capability over the ten years.’ Petch added: ‘Additionally, the


increased supercomputing power will allow us to increase the number of model runs we undertake, which will improve


”Increased capacity will permit an increase in the detail of ocean and atmospheric models, allowing a more realistic representation of large- scale weather systems”


assessments of current risks and predictions, undertake rapid attribution of severe weather in relation to our changing climate, and allow the characterisation of future worst cases – all of which is very compute hungry.’


Updating the dynamical core This is an important point. As prediction ambitions and supercomputers scale up, the number of computational resource and data management challenges also increases.


This issue is something that the Met


Office is more than aware of. A project to redesign the Met Office’s dynamical


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