The Atos company and the Croatian Meteorological and Hydrological Service (DHMZ) have signed a five-year contract on the procurement and maintenance of a supercomputer which will enable four times faster, more frequent and more accurate weather forecasts, Atos said on Tuesday.

The HRK 10 million contract envisages the procurement and installation and five-year maintenance of Atos’s new BullSequana XH2000 supercomputer which will optimise all of DHMZ’s current applications used for weather forecasts.

The new computer should be installed by the end of April 2021.

“This is state-of-the-art technology in its category of solutions based on the BullSequana XH2000 supercomputer. The new solution will optimise calculation processes in DHMZ and will enable a significant improvement in numeric forecasts of weather conditions,” Atos director for Croatia Sandi Marusic explained.

The new system will also be used as part of the AIRQ project for the improvement of managing and monitoring air quality.

Apart from medium and long term forecasts the new computer is expected to enable meteorologists to provide more accurate forecasts and define the intensity of dangerous weather conditions significantly sooner than they occur. That includes floods, thunderstorms, exceptionally strong winds, extreme temperatures and the like.

The supercomputer should also provide additional useful data for various economic branches and organisations regarding environment protection.

The AIRQ project will also be used to develop a functional model to estimate ground concentrations of pollutants.