[mulmen]

Would a faster computer improve outcomes for victims of natural disaster? How much is left undiscovered about weather?

Research spending is based on the potential for discovery. As a species we have studied weather since the beginning of time. How long have we been doing nuclear research? A century?

Is there even an opportunity cost here? Or is it an economy of scale? As we build more supercomputers the costs go down. So NOAA and ORNL both get what they need for less.

[Twirrim]

> Would a faster computer improve outcomes for victims of natural disaster? How much is left undiscovered about weather?

The US is way behind on weather modelling, in part due to lack of computing power available to do the grids at sufficiently small cells compared to Europe and other parts of the world. That means less accurate predictions and less advance notice of impending disasters, which means more risk of loss of life and impact on infrastructure and the economy (and vice versa, inaccuracy can lead to more caution than is necessary, which has economic impact too). The US has to lean on Europe etc. for predictions.

https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2020/02/smartphone-weather-ap...

Talks about the fact that IBM / Weather.com actually uses a more accurate system than the NWS uses, because the NWS is still stuck on GFS (been several years now since congress passed an act to force NOAA to update away from it, and unfortunately it takes time)

[studmuffin650]

I've heard that was the case with the old GFS model. They just updated the GFS model in 2021 to provide higher accuracy: https://www.noaa.gov/media-release/noaa-upgrades-flagship-us....

I'm not entirely sure how it compared the ECMWF model during last years hurricane season, but I do think its improved substantially.

[jsmith99]

For comparison, the UK government Met Office installed a similar sized cluster of Cray XC40 machines about 6 years ago, with a 60 petaflop replacement arriving this year. Their forecasts are, anecdotally, locally considered a bit rubbish though.

[hermitdev]

You want a rubbish forecast? Just the other week, I got "no rain in your future" (24hr outlook) . I live in Seattle. It's spring. Of course there was rain.

[quanto]

This is an interesting claim. Could you share a reputable source on your claim that the US weather prediction facility is behind its European counterparts? How does the US depend on Europe for weather predictions?

[aeroman]

Although meteorology is in many ways a much older science, I think you are underselling the difference (and importance of computers here). Better computing power means a more accurate forecast, but typically also a longer forecast horizon. That is critical when preparing for natural disasters and absolutely saves lives all the time.

Even at a 3-day lead time, GFS was still suggesting landfall for hurricane Sandy outside the New York region, the longer lead times provided by other centers (with more computing power) were very important for preparation [1].

Even on the science side, increased computing power enables a host of new discoveries. Even storing the locations for all the droplets in a small cloud would require an excessive amount of memory, let alone doing any processing [2]. Increased computer power enables us to better understand how clouds respond to their environment, which is a key uncertainty in predicting climate change.

Many disciplines of meteorology are also much newer than nuclear physics. Cloud physics (for example) only really got started with the advent of weather radar (so the 1940s). Before that, even simple questions (such as can a cloud without any ice in it produce rain?) were unknown.

Even today, we still have difficulty seeing into the most intense storms. You cannot fly an aircraft in there, and radar has difficulty distinguishing different types of particle (ice, liquid, mushy ice, ice with liquid on the surface, snow) and is not good at coutning the number of particles either.

Even after thousands of years, we are onlyjust now getting the tools to understand it. There is a lot left to discover about the weather!

[1] - https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/201...

[2] - https://www.cloudsandclimate.com/blog/clouds_and_climate/#id...

[Kuinox]

> Erik P. DeBenedictis of Sandia National Laboratories has theorized that a zettaFLOPS (1021 or one sextillion FLOPS) computer is required to accomplish full weather modeling, which could cover a two-week time span accurately.[121][122][123] Such systems might be built around 2030.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercomputer

[ip26]

One of the more commonly discussed values is predicting where a major hurricane makes landfall. We can't reliably do that yet, but if we could, evacuation zones would be both smaller & more effective.