Contact:  Stephanie Kenitzer           FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
                                       October 9, 1998

The National Weather Service has awarded a contract to lease a new supercomputer that will significantly improve its weather, flood and climate forecasts for the country from International Business Machines (IBM), the Commerce Department's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced.

The four-year, $35.6 million contract, awarded to IBM of Somers, N.Y., was signed today and is contingent on the availability of funding.

The new high-performance Class VIII computing system will allow the National Weather Service's National Centers for Environmental Prediction in Camp Springs, Md., to operate more sophisticated models of the atmosphere and oceans to improve weather, flood and climate forecasts for the country.

A Class VIII computer is a system representative of the eighth generation of high-performance computers, where each generation represents approximately a five- to 10-fold increase in sustained computational power over the previous generation.

"Accurate weather forecasting is one of the great scientific achievements of the 20th century. We have reached unprecedented levels of accuracy in recent years as a result of much research, modernization and improvements such as supercomputers, radars, satellites and other technologies, " said Department of Commerce Secretary William M. Daley. "We eagerly await the next generation of computational power because we know we can do even better in the future."

The new system will use a highly parallel computer architecture to immediately provide a significant increase in computational capacity as compared to the current system, a Cray C-90 supercomputer from Silicon Graphics, Incorporated.

The new supercomputer, which will be housed at the Suitland Federal Center in Suitland, Md., will be installed beginning in December 1998 and will be integrated into routine operations beginning in the spring of 1999. The transition of operations to the new system will be completed in late 1999.

"The accuracy of environmental forecast models today is approaching levels undreamed of 10 years ago," said D. James Baker, under secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and NOAA administrator. "As a result of this new supercomputer, the National Weather Service can run higher resolution models with improved physics to produce forecasts with better resolution and accuracy and valid at longer time scales than ever before."

"The expanded models are computationally demanding and require the robust and reliable capabilities that will be available from the IBM system," added Baker. "Supercomputers are the key to advances in weather forecasting."

Numerical weather models provide important guidance to weather forecasters. The models incorporate a variety of observations including temperature, wind, precipitation, pressure, and a host of other meteorological information from sources on the ground, in the air and in space. The observations are processed by powerful computers that then generate predictions for forecasters, allowing them to anticipate weather conditions from hours to weeks in advance-- or, as in the case of the recent El Nino, even many months in advance.

The contract with IBM will deliver a complete system to NOAA, including a full range of hardware (storage devices, communications interfaces, and other peripherals), software, system maintenance and support, and consulting services.

The contract is the result of a streamlined, competitive procurement process initiated by the Department of Commerce and conducted on a full and open basis, allowing all domestic and foreign companies to participate.