The Weather Notebook: Europe's Weather Computer

Europe's Weather Computer
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Dave Thurlow, Host

Hi. I'm Dave Thurlow. Today on the Weather Notebook producer Robin White takes us on a visit to the European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasting in Reading, England.

European Center for Medium Range
Weather Forecasting
RW: The European Center makes the most accurate weather forecasts in the world. Housed in a secure building on a tree-lined street in Reading, the Center has an air of international importance with five official languages spoken. The hub is a computer room as big as a small supermarket.

Spokesperson Austin Woods:

AW: Our current mainframe is a Fujitsu computer VPP 700 and altogether this Fujutsu can make around 250,000 million calculations a second.

RW: The massive air-cooled computer handles a torrent of data from satellites, buoys, ships, weather balloons, commercial airlines, and weather stations. Every day the computer creates a global weather map repeated 30 times from the earth's surface to the outer limits of the atmosphere. And then it builds on that huge picture to create weather forecasts for fifteen-minute increments all the way out to ten days ahead. Small initial errors can quickly grow into huge mistakes in the weather forecast. Francois Lalaurette says some parts of the world are more prone to having problems:

FL: One of the areas that is very very often shown as quite sensitive is this area over the NW of the Atlantic. That is an area where very very small errors can grow very very rapidly over (Bryan - he means "into") big errors in terms of the forecast for Europe.

RW: And big errors in the forecast can mean millions of dollars of cost for the eighteen European governments,which depend on the predictions from Reading.

Robin White is a freelance producer from San Francisco. The Weather Notebook is underwritten by Subaru, the beauty of all wheel drive with major support provided by the National Science Foundation.