Green Science: Crunching Climate Data

Big Data is cool.

Not just any computer can handle massive data sets and circuit frying calculations

It take a special kind of computer. Super, actually.

Enter “Yellowstone”:  a new supercomputer solely dedicated to climate science at the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s (NCAR) Wyoming Supercomputing Center

Via treehugger.com:

World’s Most Powerful Supercomputer Devoted to Climate Change Turns On

The 1.5 petaflop IBM computer can run an astonishing 1.5 quadrillion calculations per second, ranking it in the top 20 most powerful computers in the world. As Time Techland reports, that means a mammoth amount of computing power will now be dedicated to “studying everything from hurricanes and tornadoes to geomagnetic storms, tsunamis, wildfires, air pollution and the location of water beneath the earth’s surface.”

Yellowstone gives climate scientists a powerful new tool for forecasting weather patterns, modelling climate change impacts, and precipitation changes.