Supercomputer 'Bhaskara' unveiled, to help better weather forecast

NEW DELHI: Union Minister Harsha Vardhan today dedicated to the service of the nation supercomputer 'Bhaskara', which will help meteorologists in research and weather prediction including effective forecast of tropical cyclone, heavy rainfall and cloud burst events.

The present augmentation shall enable the Earth System Science Organisation-National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (ESSO-NCMRWF) to provide very high resolution 10 days' deterministic weather forecasts and probabilistic forecasts from a 44-member ensemble prediction system.

This is within the generally accepted time window of about five hours from the standard observation time with a horizontal resolution of 1.5 km and probabilistic forecasts using an ensemble prediction system.

"Now we are ahead of China and the UK and match the facilities of Europe and the US," Harsh Vardhan, the Minister of Earth Science, said.

E N Rajagopal, Head, NCMRWF said 'Bhaskara' will be very "essential" in ensuring better forecasting.

With the commissioning of the IBM iDataPlex Supercomputer of peak computing power of 350 teraflops with 67 terabytes of aggregate memory, the overall ESSO High Performance Computing (HPC) facility will have a peak computing power of 1.14 petaflops.