September 1991 is when I started life as a weather forecaster at the London Weather Centre in Holborn.
It was much more of a hands-on experience then, with paper charts to analyse and hand draw the fronts, highs and lows.
It felt as if the human forecaster was almost more important and reliable than the computer models – many people had been in the Met Office for decades with a wealth of knowledge and experience.
Their "gut feeling" about certain weather set ups often brought a more accurate forecast than the models.
Back then, the Cray computer calculated 10 Gflops a second and had a local resolution of 17km.
The computer modelled 19 vertical levels through the atmosphere. It was all about interpretation and judgement – comparing the models with real information from radar and satellite.
It has often been said that today's four-day forecasts are as accurate as the old one-day forecast. So, obviously, some dramatic changes in technology have taken place through my meteorological career.
By 2009, when I had moved to Sky Weather, the Met Office had continued to invest and upgrade its computers to the IBM Power6 which brought 140 Tflops of calculations a second with a local resolution of 1.5km through 70 vertical levels of the atmosphere.
It is a faster computer with good resolution and coverage and, in comparison to 1991, the models are reliable and accurate.
I do still make comparisons with real data and see how the model is fairing but it is often very good and the consistency gives confidence too.
The new supercomputer is even faster and over an amazingly high local resolution of 300m.
This will map our orography and topography accurately but we still need the data coverage to match these improvements. It is an excellent step in the right direction, though, towards the perfect forecast.
The development will excite all those involved in studying the weather, and those who receive our forecasts will hopefully notice changes in our confidence with the models and our accuracy.
In this day and age when it's all about information, I think it will give the customer more of what they want. It would be nice if we could actually make the weather too!
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