The Meteorological Office of the United Kingdom is making huge claims that it can now predict the weather a year before it even occurs. The assertion comes in the midst of the office acquiring a £97 million supercomputer.
The machine weighs about 11 double decker bus and is capable of 16 trillion calculations per second. With this, scientists believe that they can now predict with some accuracy the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) weather phenomenon in the Atlantic Ocean, which mainly dictates the British winter.
Met Office Using 'Hindcasting' To Predict NAO's Behavior
High pressure over the Azores in the Atlantic and low pressure over Iceland is responsible for the said phenomenon. A spike in westerly winds, cool summer, and mild, rainy winter occurs when a large pressure difference is observed. Conversely, fewer winds and frigid weather drapes the U.K. when there's little pressure difference, said the Daily Mail.
The Met Office is apparently employing a technique called "hindcasting" to anticipate the NAO's chaotic system, which is thought to be quite erratic. To test the accuracy of their supercomputer, scientists took weather data going way back to 1981 and feed it to the machine.
The result was that the supercomputer could predict a year in advance the behavior of winter weather and what it would've done for the past 35 years with an accuracy of over 60 percent. This would allow the government, health agencies, and the energy and transport sectors to adjust accordingly based on the prediction offered by the Met Office.
Doubts Loom Above Met Office Regarding New Claims On Weather Prediction
"Understanding and predicting the changes in the North Atlantic Oscillation could have significant economic benefits including potential boosts in climate services for a range of sectors including transport, energy, water management and the insurance industry," said Dr. Nick Dunstone, lead author of the Met Office. "This is an exciting first step in developing useful winter climate predictions on longer timescales."
But others are doubting these claim as the weather service has faced criticisms in the past where scientists inaccurately offered predictions that were way off the mark.
Once such prediction happened in 2007 where the office anticipated that the upcoming summer wouldn't have torrential days yet when it rolled around it did exactly that. The likelihood of predicting the weather a full year ahead is also slim as there are multiple factors to take into consideration during the summer months.
Still, scientists are hopeful that their endeavor will provide better assumptions in the future so that people can equip themselves should disaster looms over the horizon. Currently, the Met Office takes in over 100 million daily observations across the globe gathering data from weather balloons, satellites and hundreds of commercial planes sending information as they fly between their destination, according to the Telegraph.
