It's not just inadequate computing power. Cliff Mass has a good run-down on his blog: http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2012/03/us-fallen-behind-in-numerical-weathe

It's not just inadequate computing power. Cliff Mass has a good run-down on his blog: http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2012/03/us-fallen-behind-in-numerical-weather.html http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2012/03/us-fallen-behind-in-nu... The number two reason on Cliff's list is "The U.S. has used inferior data assimilation", but that will be changing next week! The Ensemble Kalman Filter goes live next week: http://www.nws.noaa.gov/os/notification/tin15-43gefs.htm http://www.nws.noaa.gov/os/notification/tin15-43gefs.htm It's unlikely this will cause an upset (the US is far behind), but it should at least close the gap.