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(Guardian)   After 30 years, the UK's most powerful supercomputers still can't forecast British weather three days out. Three letters to assist you, CPU: B-A-D   (theguardian.com) divider line
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    More: Awkward, Met Office, Weather forecasting, Climate of the United Kingdom, United Kingdom, Temperature, Supercomputer, predictions of accurate UK weather forecasts, Met Office's first supercomputer  
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499 clicks; posted to STEM » on 03 Feb 2023 at 11:30 PM (7 weeks ago)   |   Favorite    |   share:  Share on Twitter share via Email Share on Facebook



18 Comments     (+0 »)
View Voting Results: Smartest and Funniest
 
Lambskincoat [TotalFark]
2023-02-03 6:30:17 PM  
The best engineers in the world, just look at the Jaguar. (s)
 
Marcus Aurelius [TotalFark] [OhFark]
2023-02-03 7:19:37 PM  
Just say "cold and rainy", and you've got 90% of the forecast covered.
 
Carter Pewterschmidt [TotalFark]
2023-02-03 7:30:38 PM  

Lambskincoat: The best engineers in the world, just look at the Jaguar. (s)


You do know that computers were pretty much invented in the UK, right?

The original modern proper electronic programmable computer was designed and built in the UK during the war. We kept it secret for decades. And totally unconnected no company owned a computer, or used a computer to run their business, before Lyons Tea Shops built one, totally unaware of the Bletchley Park computer. Lyons used it to run payroll, production planning, accounts etc and at night let universities use it for research. They started building them for other people and that business ended up becoming ICL who are now owned by Fujitsu.

I think British weather is just too unpredictable for computers. Don't forget we're at the same latitude as the bottom of Hudson Bay but have far milder winters thanks to the gulfstream etc.
 
MaudlinMutantMollusk [TotalFark] [OhFark]
2023-02-03 8:35:47 PM  
Here in California they just run the models a dozen times and pick the forecast they think will get the best ratings
 
2fardownthread [recently expired TotalFark]
2023-02-03 9:09:21 PM  
I am thinking that the UK is a pretty complex system. As mentioned upthread though, the default is pretty much the same, so nobody cares too much... as a practical matter.

Colorado, which is notorious for weird weather, is pretty predictable except for the front range. Most areas of the world have huge seasonal systems and predictable patterns. They are flat, or they have some feature or coast that dominates the whole system.

But the UK has so many gyres and eddies...

and Harolds and Georges....
 
Carter Pewterschmidt [TotalFark]
2023-02-03 9:16:38 PM  

MaudlinMutantMollusk: Here in California they just run the models a dozen times and pick the forecast they think will get the best ratings


They actually record them a week or so in advance.
Fark user imageView Full Size
 
iron de havilland [TotalFark] [OhFark]
2023-02-03 10:15:29 PM  
As of March 2017, the supercomputer used by the Met Office was a Cray XC40 setup, that was #11 in TOP500.

Maybe that just says more about the British obsession with the weather, than anything else, though.
 
ecmoRandomNumbers [TotalFark] [OhFark]
2023-02-04 1:34:36 AM  
With the currents around the North Atlantic, you're going to need a non-existent quantum computer.
 
erik-k [OhFark]
2023-02-04 2:28:52 AM  

ecmoRandomNumbers: With the currents around the North Atlantic, you're going to need a non-existent quantum computer.


I know you're joking but I can't resist:

Quantum computers are useless for large-output problems (like a map of temperature on a billion-voxel grid) because even if you could get a 1024 qbit machine to act on a 2^1024-bit phase space, you can still only read out 1024 bits. However they excel at things like search or factorization problems, which require an inordinate number of operations on a data set but only a small output (the factors, or the ordering).

Fun fact: The Lyuapanov exponent for earth's weather is known, and it's fast enough that adding a single hbar worth of angular momentum - the smallest amount that exists - would cause the weather to be completely different in 3 months. Which means it is absolutely, 100% physically impossible to predict the weather more than a fraction of that time in advance.
 
Gordon Bennett [TotalFark] [OhFark]
2023-02-04 6:06:04 AM  
Gradually this optimism was eroded by the realisation that despite the millions of calculations the computers had the capacity to make, the outcomes still varied wildly depending on the data that was fed in.

Yes, that is indeed how mathematics works.
 
HugeMistake [TotalFark]
2023-02-04 6:10:13 AM  

iron de havilland: As of March 2017, the supercomputer used by the Met Office was a Cray XC40 setup, that was #11 in TOP500.

Maybe that just says more about the British obsession with the weather, than anything else, though.


No, it says how difficult climatology, as well as weather, is. NOAA runs half a dozen supercomputers with a total compute capacity over 42 petaflops. The two newest, Dogwood and Cactus are also Cray systems and are ranked 49 and 50 in the TOP500. Japan's Fugaku, another climate and weather modeling machine, is #2. (#1 is at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and does modeling for extreme scientific experiments.)

Are the Japanese more obsessed about the weather than the British, or is climate and weather just really, really hard and really, really important?

BTW this is a powerful argument against the theory that we live in a simulation. We can't even simulate the weather for a small part of the globe with the most powerful computers known to us. Now imagine how much resource would be required to simulate our entire planet's weather, let alone everything else that is going on here.
 
eyeq360 [TotalFark]
2023-02-04 7:43:04 AM  
Gradually this optimism was eroded by the realisation that despite the millions of calculations the computers had the capacity to make, the outcomes still varied wildly depending on the data that was fed in.

Have they not heard of Edward Lorenz and the butterfly effect? He came up with that in the 1960s after modelling weather forecasts that went crazy due to tiny differences.
 
natazha [BareFark]
2023-02-04 8:45:02 AM  

Marcus Aurelius: Just say "cold and rainy", and you've got 90% of the forecast covered.


Not unlike western Oregon, except you need a summer forecast of 'hot, dry, sunny'.

Weather comes from four directions: the Pacific, Canada, California and the Rockies. It can shift from one to another in a matter of hours.
 
Mad_Radhu
2023-02-04 12:40:55 PM  

Carter Pewterschmidt: Lambskincoat: The best engineers in the world, just look at the Jaguar. (s)

You do know that computers were pretty much invented in the UK, right?

The original modern proper electronic programmable computer was designed and built in the UK during the war. We kept it secret for decades. And totally unconnected no company owned a computer, or used a computer to run their business, before Lyons Tea Shops built one, totally unaware of the Bletchley Park computer. Lyons used it to run payroll, production planning, accounts etc and at night let universities use it for research. They started building them for other people and that business ended up becoming ICL who are now owned by Fujitsu.

I think British weather is just too unpredictable for computers. Don't forget we're at the same latitude as the bottom of Hudson Bay but have far milder winters thanks to the gulfstream etc.


Yeah, but after that the pinnacle of the UK computer industry was the ZX Spectrum.
 
iron de havilland [TotalFark] [OhFark]
2023-02-04 1:29:40 PM  

Mad_Radhu: Carter Pewterschmidt: Lambskincoat: The best engineers in the world, just look at the Jaguar. (s)

You do know that computers were pretty much invented in the UK, right?

The original modern proper electronic programmable computer was designed and built in the UK during the war. We kept it secret for decades. And totally unconnected no company owned a computer, or used a computer to run their business, before Lyons Tea Shops built one, totally unaware of the Bletchley Park computer. Lyons used it to run payroll, production planning, accounts etc and at night let universities use it for research. They started building them for other people and that business ended up becoming ICL who are now owned by Fujitsu.

I think British weather is just too unpredictable for computers. Don't forget we're at the same latitude as the bottom of Hudson Bay but have far milder winters thanks to the gulfstream etc.

Yeah, but after that the pinnacle of the UK computer industry was the ZX Spectrum.


Don't rate ARM, no?
 
Mad_Radhu
2023-02-04 1:42:01 PM  

iron de havilland: Mad_Radhu: Carter Pewterschmidt: Lambskincoat: The best engineers in the world, just look at the Jaguar. (s)

You do know that computers were pretty much invented in the UK, right?

The original modern proper electronic programmable computer was designed and built in the UK during the war. We kept it secret for decades. And totally unconnected no company owned a computer, or used a computer to run their business, before Lyons Tea Shops built one, totally unaware of the Bletchley Park computer. Lyons used it to run payroll, production planning, accounts etc and at night let universities use it for research. They started building them for other people and that business ended up becoming ICL who are now owned by Fujitsu.

I think British weather is just too unpredictable for computers. Don't forget we're at the same latitude as the bottom of Hudson Bay but have far milder winters thanks to the gulfstream etc.

Yeah, but after that the pinnacle of the UK computer industry was the ZX Spectrum.

Don't rate ARM, no?


Oh yeah, forgot about Acorn.
 
DON.MAC [TotalFark] [OhFark]
2023-02-04 5:33:20 PM  
University of Oklahoma had one of the best meteorology departments in the world.  One of the classes does forecasts for other parts of the world and they are far better than the local weather departments.  It would be interesting to compare OU's forecasts to the Met Offices forecast. When they have done forecast for my area, they were far better than the local Aussie Bureau of Meteorology.
 
HugeMistake [TotalFark]
2023-02-04 6:53:02 PM  

DON.MAC: University of Oklahoma had one of the best meteorology departments in the world.  One of the classes does forecasts for other parts of the world and they are far better than the local weather departments.  It would be interesting to compare OU's forecasts to the Met Offices forecast. When they have done forecast for my area, they were far better than the local Aussie Bureau of Meteorology.


The Met Office is on par with Oklahoma and NOAA. There's one in Germany that's also top tier.
 
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