A new weather and climate supercomputer located in Iceland has gone live.

Part of the United Weather Centres West (UWC-West) collaboration between the National Meteorological Services (NMSs) of Ireland, Denmark, Iceland, and the Netherlands, Met Éireann will enable forecasts to be calculated at higher levels of detail.

UWC West supercomputer
– Met Eireann

Housed at the Icelandic Met Office data center facility, the new supercomputer is powered entirely by renewable hydropower and geothermal energy sources to keep down running costs and its CO2 footprint.

The supercomputer is split into two units: Aurora, which handles the forecast (and not to be confused with the US government's Aurora system at the Argonne National Laboratory); and Borealis, which does the research. The supercomputer is capable of 4,000 trillion calculations per second - or 4 petaflops.

The supercomputer is running a new numerical weather prediction (NWP) model based on the Harmonie-Arome source code. It covers the area from East Greenland to southern Italy with a granularity of two square kilometers, down from 2.5km. The new model also represents the atmosphere at 90 levels, an increase from the prior model's 65.

In addition, the supercomputer can run every hour, while the prior computing capabilities could only run every three hours.

Eoin Moran, director of Met Éireann, Ireland's NMS, said: “Pulling together the expertise from our four countries allows us to prepare for the future faster and more efficiently. Making our common forecasting system operational is the culmination of five years of intense cooperation on computer and models by the four institutes.

"It represents not only a technical achievement but the confirmation that joining expertise and experience can lead to greater things. My colleagues in Denmark, Iceland, and the Netherlands all agree that, through the UWC-West collaboration, we are paving new ways for weather services to work.”

Eoin Sherlock, head of forecasting at Met Éireann, added: “Overall, this new model version allows us to get a better handle on the uncertainty of the predictions."

Numerical Weather Prediction models are run a number of times with slightly different initial conditions, each of these then providing slightly different outcomes - this is known as an Ensemble Prediction System (EPS).

Sherlock said Met Éireann’s previous operational model consisted of fifteen EPS “members”, or individual runs. With the new supercomputer, this number has doubled, benefiting probabilistic analyses and the forecasters’ understanding of complex scenarios.

HPE was selected to build the shared supercomputer in November 2021. It was originally expected to be installed by Q2 2022 and go live by 2023.

The UWC-West collaboration was established in 2019. The organization's supercomputer has two units - one dedicated to operational weather forecasting and another to climate research. The four NMSs commonly operate and maintain the computer and model system.