Supercomputers race to predict storms
Thousands of miles from the rain and wind of Hurricane Ivan, a model of the storm swirls in the memory and processors of a supercomputer that predicts its likely course and strength.
Working through complex mathematical equations that describe the atmosphere's behavior across the globe, hundreds of microprocessors perform billions of calculations each second on observations collected by sensors dropped by aircraft and other monitors.
The result, after more than an hour of number crunching at the U.S. Navy's Fleet Numerical weather computing center, is just one of the many predictions generated by supercomputers around the world that help frame such life-or-death decisions as whether to order evacuations and where to safely set up shelters.
The programs that model the atmosphere and the high-performance computers that do this work have revolutionized weather forecasting, improving our ability to predict the paths of hurricanes and fluctuations in their intensity.
