HPC and extreme weather - How tech is helping save our lives and livelihoods

Technology Now

2024 has already been a difficult year for extreme weather. The hurricane season on the eastern seaboard of North America is already one of the earliest active seasons on record. Meanwhile, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the US, as of August 8th, this year has already seen 19 weather events cause damage upwards of a billion dollars, with 149 people left dead. That’s in the US alone.

So, how are supercomputing and high performance computing helping to mitigate the effects of such extreme weather? Joining us to discuss is Ilene Carpenter, Earth Sciences segment manager at Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

This is Technology Now, a weekly show from Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Every week we look at a story that's been making headlines, take a look at the technology behind it, and explain why it matters to organizations and what we can learn from it.

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About this week's guest, Ilene Carpenter: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilene-carpenter-9a15511/

Sources cited in this week’s episode:
The first computer weather predictions: https://web.archive.org/web/20200626175559/https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/101943.pdf
US National Weather Service computing power: https://www.weather.gov/about/supercomputers#:~:text=NWS%20super%20computers%20hold%20numerical,buoys%2C%20radar%2C%20and%20more
UK Met Office computing power: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/who-we-are/innovation/supercomputer
Statistics on US extreme weather damage in 2024: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/billions/
Atom interferometry breakthrough: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ade4454