Britain to build a $156 million supercomputer for better weather forecasts

© Alastair Grant/Associated Press

Low cloud envelops office blocks in the City of London as pedestrians walk across Waterloo Bridge over the River Thames in London, Monday, Oct. 13, 2014.

Britons are known for talking at great length about the weather - sometimes even obsessing about it - and soon they'll have a lot more to chat about with the advent of more detailed weather forecasts courtesy of a computer equipped with more processing power than 100,000 Playstations combined.

Britain's Met Office has been given the green light to build a £97 million ($156 million) supercomputer that is 13 times more powerful than the current system used, which will help the weather service to provide better hourly forecast updates.

While the introduction of the supercomputer will mean daily forecasts should improve, it will also provide more precise information to help British regions understand how their climate is going to change in the long-term. It may make the country more resilient to major weather events such as flooding, heavy snowfall or strong winds. The Met Office has been criticized in recent years for making inaccurate seasonal forecasts, such as projecting a drier than average winter in 2013, which turned out to be the opposite of what happened.

Speaking on programme, Met Office Chief Executive Rob Varley said the new supercomputer would "add more precision, more detail, more accuracy to our forecasts on all time scales for tomorrow the next day, next week and even the next century."

The supercomputer will improve the localisation or regionalisation of current forecasts helping meteorologists to understand a particular area where a weather event, such as fog or a summer thunderstorm, might take place.

Weighing as much as 11 double decker buses, the machine will perform 16,000 trillion calculations per second. Based at the Met Office and Exeter Science Park, it will be operation from 2015 and reach full capacity in 2017. Britain is currently on track to experience its warmest year on record yet.