Letters to the editor: UK to spend £1.2bn on weather technology

Whatever else about Brexit, there is at least one field where the British continue to lead the world, namely weather forecasting.

Everybody knew about Storm Dennis almost a week before it arrived and that was due to Britain’s Met Office computers.

The bad news is that even then nobody knew where exactly in England there would be flooding.

Now the Met Office is going to buy a much more powerful supercomputer system for £1.2bn (€1.4bn). Ideally this will be able to forecast almost on a street by street level. (They only got serious about computing power in response to Michael Fish’s infamous failure to predict a hurricane in one forecast in 1987 — they should name their supercomputing systems after him him so the current one is Fish 3 or whatever.)

Met Éireann cannot afford a fraction of that computing power and I assume that the Met Office will always have more and better weather data about Ireland and so know better what is going to happen here in Cork than anybody in Dublin does.

I assume that means that if Met Éireann are not already paying the Met Office for access to their data regarding Ireland then they will sooner or later.

Frank Desmond

Evergreen Road

Cork City