Last summer’s weather — the hottest June on record, followed by a very wet July — certainly raised our awareness of climate change. However, the inaccuracies of day-by-day weather forecasting have led some to suggest — wrongly — that we should not believe the predictions of long-term climate models.
Weather stations around the world (1) gather data on atmospheric conditions. Weather forecasts require knowledge of current atmospheric conditions across the world in order to predict what will happen in the future. For this they use huge supercomputers, such as the IBM Blue Gene/Q Sequoia supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (2), which can carry out 504 billion computing events per second.
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