It&#x27;s a very exciting time in weather forecasting. We&#x27;re getting all kinds of new observations available, from cheap LEO satellites to smartphone sensors to smart umbrellas and everything else. And faster computers! And more parallel computers! Think about every single iPhone and every single Galaxy S in the world as a useful sensor array _and_ a parallel processor...<p>Weather forecasting accuracy is still constrained by both the available observations and the ability to run the forecast models. This new supercomputer won&#x27;t be nearly enough to process all the new data that will arrive in the next few years, so the pendulum will swing back to the bottleneck being computing power soon enough. I think the most exciting things will happen over the next 5-10 years, as we end up with another 2-3 order of magnitude increase in the available observations to the models and we&#x27;ll build new supercomputers to process them. I bet we can get incredible improvements, things like reliable 2-week weather forecasts.