In Brazil, an Explosion in Computing Power is Revolutionizing Weather Prediction
Rio de Janeiro's Rio Operations Center IBMHow better weather forecasts predict a more efficient future In Rio de Janeiro, when a massive storm comes in off the Atlantic, like one did a couple of years ago, hundreds of lives and thousands of homes can be lost in a single afternoon. But in a new state-of-the art command center, a kind of municipal war room dedicated to making the entire city more efficient, supercomputers are monitoring the weather via high-powered weather models custom engineered by IBM. Deep Thunder, as the weather-modeling project is known, keeps city leaders and regional agencies abreast of what the skies have in store, square kilometer by square kilometer, both in real time and 48 hours into the future. Even a decade ago, something like this wouldn't have been possible. But now, explosions in computing power and sophisticated software design are driving a revolution in atmospheric...