The government has spent $1.5 million on a 'supercomputer' that will be used to help the mainland predict the weather during the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
Scientific officer Wong Wai-kin said the Observatory installed the Superblade HPC - which is not yet fully operational - a few weeks ago.
'The machine is made up of 30 blades, containing two computers each. Each blade can function alone but can also communicate with the others to form one high-performance computer,' he said.
'We are now working on the software to make this thing work. Once it is operational it can predict severe weather - like rain and thunderstorms - six hours ahead of them happening. It will also expand the types of severe weather warning we can forecast.'
At the moment rainstorms can be predicted only three hours before they happen.
Using the software now being designed by the Observatory, the supercomputer - which was bought from a Shenzhen company, Galactic Computing - will act as a forecaster, making its own predictions by compiling radar, satellite and Observatory data.
In addition, it will detect things like thunderstorms and squalls using algorithms developed by five scientific officers working full-time on the project. The prediction of weather within a 0-6 hour time period, called 'now-casting' is usually done by human forecasters.