Met Office & Microsoftâs Climate Forecasting Supercomputer
The Met Office has been making meteorological predictions in the UK, from regular weather forecasts to climate change, since 1854.
The technology that the Met Office has used across that 171-year history has changed considerably.
It has now launched a new system, powered by Microsoft Azure, as it prepares to handle larger computational demands than ever before.
The changeover has been years in the making and represents the agency's 14th generation of supercomputing capability.
The Met Officeâs new cloud-based supercomputer will be able to perform 60 quadrillion calculations per second, which will not only help to improve the accuracy of weather forecasts, but also help scientists to advance climate research.
âThis is critically important for industries such as aviation, energy, shipping and emergency services and will help us all better prepare for more extreme weather events resulting from climate change,â says Darren Hardman, CEO of Microsoft UK.
The new system’s enhanced forecasting capabilities
With its new cloud-based system, the Met Office aims to deliver more accurate and longer-range weather predictions.
"People ask how a bigger computer improves the weather forecast,” says Charles Ewen, CIO at the Met Office.
“One big thing this new computer will allow us to do in the near future is to be able to produce 14-day forecasts with a similar kind of accuracy than we can today for seven, eight, nine days.”
The increased computational power enables meteorologists to process approximately 50 billion weather observations daily, allowing the organisation to complete more complex weather models and data analyses.
'Science as a service'
The transition to Microsoft Azure is set to provide the Met Office with flexible computing resources that can be scaled according to specific research needs.
"Essentially there's more science than we have the compute power to deliver, so it's not a question of how much compute do you need, it's how much you can get," Charles explains.
This flexibility eliminates the need to build new physical infrastructure for each research project.
The cloud-based approach transforms the traditional supercomputing model into what Charles describes as "supercomputing for science as a service".
Climate research applications
Beyond daily weather forecasting, the Azure platform enhances the Met Office's climate research capabilities.
Ségolène Berthou is the Scientific Manager at the Met Office. She leads a research team focusing on environmental predictions and believes that the new system will be immediately beneficial for her work.
"The coupled system we're preparing is running faster and more smoothly on the new supercomputer,” she says.
“This is very good news because it means we can now be even more confident in our climate projections and have longer slices of time running this model.”
The improved computational resources allow researchers to run multiple scenarios simultaneously through an approach called "ensembles".
This methodology helps forecast extreme weather events with greater accuracy and earlier warnings.
Data accessibility and AI integration
A key advantage of the Azure platform is improved accessibility to the Met Office's vast historical weather data.
"One of the reasons Microsoft is such an exciting partner for us is that we feel that there is much more value that can be extracted from our data by other people as well as by us," says Penny Endersby, CEO of the Met Office.
The organisation is already preparing for the integration of artificial intelligence technologies.
More than 100 staff members have completed foundational machine-learning training while approximately 20 have undertaken master's programmes in the field.
Sustainability through efficiency
Though the transition was complex, requiring parallel operation of both systems for over a month, the cloud-based approach offers sustainability benefits through resource optimisation.
The Azure platform enables the Met Office to use only the computing resources needed for specific operations rather than maintaining constantly running physical infrastructure.
"A big change like this is like changing the engines when you're flying over the Atlantic because you can never have a stop, which is why we did the long parallel run with the old supercomputer," Penny explains.
For the Met Office, this technological transformation represents not just an upgrade but a fundamental shift in its operational approach.
The ultimate measure of success, according to Penny, will be "delivering better, more valuable forecasts to the industries, governments and citizens that we serve".
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