Powerful supercomputers to strengthen weather forecasts by 2021, says MoES

Over the next one year, India’s weather services will get a significant boost, with the induction of more powerful supercomputers than present-day systems, said M Rajeevan, secretary, Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES). He was speaking on ‘Recent Progress in Weather and Climate Services’.

Rajeevan added that India’s computational power used for weather services will be augmented to incorporate Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence.

Seeing rapid growth of its computational capacity, MoES started off with a 40 Teraflop system in 2008. This got upgraded to 1 Petaflop by 2013-2014, and two years ago, a 6.8 Petaflop capacity ‘Pratyush’ was deployed at IITM, Pune. The same year, ‘Mihir’, a 2.8 Petaflop system was made operational at National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecast (NCMRWF), Noida.