Met Office upgrades

Met office unveils supercomputer.

The Met Office is celebrating 150 years by unveiling a new supercomputer which they predict will put them at the forefront of weather forecasting. It will allow meteorologists to provide more accurate advice to the government and the public in the face of increasingly extreme weather patterns.  The Met Office made the announcement at the British Association's Festival of Science at the University of Exeter.  The new system is one of the most sophisticated in Europe.  It allows forecasters to track weather patterns across the world - from a massive dust storm to a single cloud.

In hot weather, demand for wasp killer increases by up to 500% and leg wax sales go up more than 10-fold - information that supermarkets are happy to pay for.

It's about time the Met Office upgraded.  When I interviewed there for my internship year in 1995 they were still using FORTRAN.  Knowing FORTRAN is one of those things you leave off your CV/resume because it's a relic of the punch card computing system, ancient, unwieldy, and embarrassing.  You can do stuff in Java with so much more style.