Agreement with US Navy provides The Weather Channel with access to SGI Origin 3800Amsterdam 15 September 2001 In a bold step, the US Navy and The Weather Channel have signed a memorandum of understanding that encourages professional collaboration, leading to a joint examination of new methods and technologies for producing and presenting climate and weather forecasts.
The agreement gives The Weather Channel access to the SGI Origin 3800 supercomputer at the Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center (FNMOC) in Monterey, California. This 128-processor machine, one of the world's most sophisticated tools for global weather and ocean modelling, utilises the largest existing real time databases of oceanic and atmospheric observations.
It will also have access to the Navy's Coupled Ocean/Atmosphere Mesoscale Prediction System (COAMPS), which is used to predict changes in ocean and weather conditions in highly complex coastal areas of the world. Such collaborations will ultimately benefit the advancement of the science of weather prediction.
"This agreement with The Weather Channel is a direct result of the Navy's recent decision to broaden the release policy for COAMPS", stated Rear Admiral Richard D. West, oceanographer of the Navy. "This release includes COAMPS model products, such as weather maps, that are produced by FNMOC. With COAMPS model products made available to the public, more professional civilian weather forecasters stand to benefit from having additional forecast guidance at their disposal."
The agreement provides the Navy with a source of validation and feedback from The Weather Channel for its weather and ocean model. In addition, the Navy is exploring graphics used by The Weather Channel for the presentation of meteorological data.
FNMOC is in the process of converting its operations from Cray C90 technology to the SGI Origin 3000 server series, based on the highly scalable SGI NUMA modular computing architecture. A 512-processor SGI Origin 3800 system was recently delivered to Fleet Numerical. The 128- and 512-processor Origins meanwhile should be cranking through the data by the time of IBC 2001.
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