Supercomputer 'Bhaskara' to Give Boost to India's Weather Forecasting

'Bhaskara', a super computer, will now help meteorologists in conducting research and development related to prediction of weather including effective forecast of tropical cyclone, heavy rainfall and cloud burst events.

The supercomputer, with a high-resolution regional models, will be dedicated to the nation on June 2 by Union Minister for Earth Sciences Harsh Vardhan.

The present augmentation shall enable Earth System Science Organisation - National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (ESSO-NCMRWF) to provide high-resolution 10 days global weather forecast and prediction of extreme weather events using very high-resolution regional models with a horizontal resolution of 1.5 km and probabilistic forecasts using an ensemble prediction system.

"The High Performance Computing (HPC) facility installed at ESSO-NCMRWF is a part of the overall ESSO HPC facility which includes the system installed at ESSO-IITM (Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology).

"This HPC facility at ESSO-NCMRWF is the result of a competitive procurement which resulted in the acquisition of an IBM iDataPlex Supercomputer of peak computing power of 350 teraflops with 67 terabytes of aggregate memory.

"With the commissioning of 'Bhaskara', the overall ESSO HPC facility will have a peak computing power of 1.14 petaflops," a statement issued by the Ministry of Earth Sciences said.

The augmentation shall enable ESSO-NCMRWF to provide very high resolution 10 days deterministic weather forecast and probabilistic forecast from a 44-member ensemble prediction system within the generally accepted time window of about 5 hours from the standard observation time.