Better weather forecasts, courtesy of The Weather Company and NVIDIA


Monitoring weather events just got easier. Running on an IBM POWER9 supercomputer flexing NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPUs, IBM’s Global High-Resolution Atmospheric Forecasting (GRAF) model can now deliver hourly updates for every 3.2 km to 40% of the world.

This means that most of the world’s populated areas, as well as oceanic hotspots for weather systems, will get accurate forecasts more frequently. The US, Europe and Japan have long enjoyed precision hourly weather forecasts over such distances, but not elsewhere. For other regions, weather updates typically arrive every six hours and over every 9.6 km, which is often too late.

The Weather Company, a unit of IBM, will produce forecasts for 26 million locations across the world, benefitting travellers and even energy markets traders. The Weather Channel, Weather Underground and other weather destinations and mobile apps now make this capability available to consumers and businesses worldwide.


When heavy rainfall is expected, including monsoon-driven storms, GRAF can provide detailed, potentially more accurate weather forecasts for how much rain is expected in the next 15 hours, said Todd Hutchinson, Director for numerical weather prediction at The Weather Company.

“This can lead to additional information that could be passed on to authorities and consumers, helping individuals better prepare for flooding that may occur during the upcoming day or night or both,” Hutchinson said.

The IBM POWER9 supercomputer used by GRAF has 296 NVIDIA V100 GPUs to chew through huge volumes of weather data. In addition to weather radar systems, data comes in from satellites, aircraft, weather balloons, barometers and thermometers on the ground.

Weather models are also run in 3D for the atmosphere above points on Earth. That’s about 1.5 billion points monitored for changes in parameters like atmospheric pressure and temperature in fractions of a second, leading to 54 GB of information processed every half second.

According to Hutchinson, 2,000 CPUs based on Intel’s Broadwell microarchitecture would be needed to handle the same task. Instead of eight rows of rack servers with CPUs, GRAF uses a single row of rack servers running GPUs, with the consequent savings in power and space.

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