Rome (AFP)
The medium-term weather forecast will make next year a giant step with the arrival in Italy of a new super calculator, among the most powerful in the world, ensures an expert in the field, Florence Rabier.
The European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, a European intergovernmental body, of which Ms Rabier is the Director General, will equip itself in 2020 with a powerful computer capable of analyzing billions of pieces of information in record time.
Already, for a week, this center has gained three hours on the relevance of its forecasts, said Ms. Rabier in an interview with AFP.
"We have gone from 27 to 30 hours, but the more we plan far, the more we can anticipate extreme weather events", which can save lives, says this meteorological engineer.
Three hours of gains for the evacuation of a city threatened by a hurricane, "it can count," insists the director general of this body, based in the United Kingdom, but who will move his computer center next year to Bologna in the center of Italy, where this new equipment is expected. It will be rented for four years, technological obsolescence requires, for a total budget of 70 million euros.
But, Rabier immediately warns, "one euro invested pays ten to one hundred times more" in economic terms. A finer weather forecast, especially in terms of temperature, allows to better predict how much energy will be spent to cope with a sudden rise in the thermometer or a cold snap.
This is particularly interesting with regard to renewable energies and the production of electricity, very difficult to store, she argues.
- "Intense monsoon or not" -
"To know if the monsoon will be intense or not" also has important consequences for millions of men in the Indian subcontinent, notes again this expert, who carried out all her career at Météo-France before taking the head of this agency in January 2016.
And if this center sells some of its information to private customers, European but also Chinese or American, it offers them free of charge in case of imminent climate disaster.
Weather forecasting requires enormous computing resources because of the number of data to be processed. It is established from observations in the atmosphere, "cut into billions of small cubes", each component of which is then transformed into physical equations and mathematical models. "So, the smaller the cube, the more accurate the calculation," says Rabier.
With the new computer expected in Bologna, the cubes will no longer cover an area of 18 km2, but 10 km2, which will significantly improve the forecast, for example in terms of precipitation, with all the consequences that it can have for agriculture.
The weather forecasts are now 85% reliable at seven days, but we can already give a trend to several months.
The European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecast is supported by 34 European states, 22 of which are members of its board of directors. He is based in Reading in Britain, unless Brexit changes the game.
An inter-governmental organization that does not depend directly on the European Union, there is no reason to leave Britain.
Nevertheless, he is considering moving some of his activities, particularly those linked and funded by the European Union, under the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Program, even if nothing has been decided yet, says his director.
? 2019 AFP