The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is planning a massive upgrade to its supercomputers that will raise the processing capacity of the two mammoth machines tenfold to a combined five petaflops – or five quadrillion floating-point operations per second. The performance hike comes only a year and a half after the agency turned on the new systems.

With the weather seemingly growing more fickle with every passing year, NOAA is under more pressure than ever to deliver faster and more accurate predictions. The identical supercomputers it currently brings to the task, nicknamed “Tide” and “Gyre”, run Linux on a cluster of Intel-based servers and boast a peak capacity of 213 trillion operations per second. They replaced the Power6-based AIX systems from IBM that NOAA had used since 2008, which only managed a maximum of 73.1 teraflops each.

Later this month the agency will upgrade its existing computers to more than triple their current capacity to roughly 1.5 petaflops. Another upgrade is scheduled for later this year to bring total processing power to the 5-petaflop level. NOAA’s National Weather Service will use the added power to run an upgraded version of the Global Forecast System (GFS) that delivers greater resolution and more accurate long-term forecasts.

But while this may represent a major performance boost over the previous setup, Tide and Gyre have fallen behind the pace of the broader high-performance computing market, where benchmarks have shifted from teraflops to petaflops in recent years. The most powerful supercomputer in the world as of November is capable of running at a massive 33.86 petaflops, or more more than 75 times the total processing power at NOAA’s disposal. Nevertheless, following the upgrade the NOAA will own the eighth most powerful supercomputer in the world.

According to the agency, the improved model magnifies the minimum resolution from 17 kilometers to 13 kilometers, which means that meteorologists will have the ability to pinpoint weather variations over  smaller distances. That’s useful for producing more localized forecasts that can, for example, highlight temperature differences among neighboring towns that may have fallen through the cracks before.

The increased resolution could prove even more important in the NOAA’s other sphere of activity: predicting major weather events such as hurricanes and typhoons. The ability to identify smaller deviations can quite literally make the difference between life and death in such scenarios, as does the speed of prediction, another area that the upgrade is set to improve. NOAA says that the new model makes it possible to anticipate changes in a 13km area as far out as 10 days, a period that grows to as many as 16 days in the 55km to 33km range.

The contract for the modernization is valued at $45 million and has been awarded to IBM, with Cray Inc. providing the hardware. Big Blue has supplied NOAA’s weather forecasting operation since 2002, prior to which the agency worked directly with Cray.