Météo France wants to multiply the power of its supercomputers sixfold within five years

The call for tenders is launched. The aim is to further improve weather forecasts.

But what does a supercomputer look like? ? The two that Météo France owns are large metal cabinets, like huge fridges, lined up in the same room. They even have names, Belenos and Taranis, and can already perform up to 21 millions of billions of operations per second.

Météo France has just launched a call for tenders to replace them with even more powerful machines from 2027 because it must be understood that these supercomputers must run enormous computer programs. Meteorological models actually divide the atmosphere into small units, called “grids”, and these machines need a lot of computing power to aggregate all the atmospheric parameters of each of these meshes. They must therefore digest the millions of data on temperature, pressure, humidity, wind, which come every day from radars, satellites, and weather stations. Météo France's objective is for its supercomputers to reach a computing capacity six times greater by 2029.

The forecast will be more localized, less than 2.5 kilometers near. Calculations of wind speed or the amount of rain that will fall in a particular location will also be more precise. The orange or red alerts which are given six hours before an extreme event will also be more targeted and more numerous. A more detailed weather forecast, on a daily basis.

But also very positive economic benefits for agriculture, aviation, and the preparation of extreme events. The new supercomputers of 2027 will allow France to gain 1.4 billion euros in profits and they will also make it possible to better anticipate the effects of climate change in the future.

According to three-month seasonal forecasts, those which make it possible to give major probabilistic trends from 14 forecast models used around the world, there is a 70% chance of having temperatures higher than the seasonal averages in January, February and March.

According to these scenarios calculated by Météo France, the mildness should especially be felt in the eastern half and the south of France. Attention ! These are probable temperature averages over the quarter but this does not mean an absence of occasional cold episodes, as at the moment in certain regions.