TECHNOLOGY
“ We provide worldclass technology to support worldleading science ”
— Charles Ewen , Chief Information Officer , Met Office
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Ewen says that this supercomputer is instrumental in weather forecasting and climate prediction by making it possible to increase fidelity and resolution and provide more complete Earth System models . “ The supercomputer contributes an awful lot because you can run models at finer resolutions with a lot more complexity ,” he says . “ They take into account more of the physics and chemistry that is involved and you can operate them over longer timescales and run simulations more frequently . We can also run the same model a number of times with some different assumptions and from that we can provide information about probabilities and likelihoods .”
Weather forecasting , Ewen explains , is an intricate balance of science and technology on a vast scale . At the Met Office , the organisation has been using innovations like data analytics for decades . “ We ’ ve been working with data analytics at a large scale for many years although we typically don ’ t call these roles ‘ data analysts ’,” affirms Ewen . “ We have chief meteorologists , for example , and their job is to look at what the computer simulations say and
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