Met office unveils UK's most powerful supercomputer (but admits it may still get weather forecasts WRONG)

The Met Office unveiled Britain's most powerful super computer today, which is capable of 1,000 billion calculations every second. However, they admitted despite the £30million system being more powerful than 100,000 PCs it could still get the forecast WRONG.

The IBM computer, which is housed in special halls bigger than two football pitches, requires 1.2 megawatts of energy to run - enough to power a small town. It will provide meteorological information to a team of 400 scientists

It was switched on this week but will take a staggering two MONTHS to fully boot-up. At peak performance it will perform 1,000 billion calculations per second, but this will not be reached until 2011.

The Met Office says the machine will improve day-to-day forecasting but will still not guarantee accuracy. But it will help save millions of lives by predicting long-term patterns in global warming and forecasting extreme weather events such as typhoons and hurricanes.

Steve Foreman, chief technology officer at the Met Office, said: 'This computer will allow us to make the most accurate weather forecasts we have ever produced. People should be able to see a noticeable improvement in the accuracy of forecasting. Not only will it help us tell you what the weather will be like today and tomorrow, it will help create a much better long term picture. Obviously we can never predict the weather 100 per cent accurately, but this will help considerably.' (Daily Mail)