£30m computer still won't get the weather spot on

Published on Thursday 21 May 2009 22:22

THE Met Office yesterday unveiled Britain's most powerful super computer, capable of 1,000 billion calculations per second – yet admitted it will still get the forecast wrong.

The 30 million system is more powerful than 100,000 standard PCs or laptops and is housed in special halls bigger than two football pitches.

It requires 1.2 megawatts of energy to run and will provide information to a team of 400 scientists.

The IBM computer was switched on this week but will take two months to fully boot up. It has a peak performance of one "petaflop" – 1,000 billion calculations a second – which will not be reached until 2011.

The Met Office said the machine would improve day-to-day forecasting but would still not guarantee accuracy.

Met Office chief technology officer Steve Foreman said: "

People should be able to see a noticeable improvement in the accuracy of forecasting."