Met Office supercomputer mapped storm long before it had formed The Met Office supercomputer was able to map this series of events days before it happened using data from millions of sources across the globe such as weather stations, satellites, aeroplanes, boats, buoys and argo floats, which lie below the surface of the ocean and beam back information on the water temperature, which affects global weather systems. Housed in special halls bigger than two football pitches, the computer then takes that global weather picture and runs it forward in time. Dan Williams, Met Office spokesman, said: "The accuracy of it these days is enough to pull out factors that could lead to the storm that we saw last night. There were factors that played a role in that, there were two weather systems over the Americas which coalesced in the western Atlantic forming a fairly innocuous area of low pressure. But then because we have a particularly strong jet stream at the moment it rattled across the Atlantic fairly quickly and it was at that point just off the South West of the UK that we could see there was an area of particularly warm air that was going to be there just as that low pressure reached the UK. Those two things combined meant that this low pressure rapidly deepened just off the coast of the UK and energised it, making it much more vigorous and giving it the power it then took across the UK. The current supercomputer requires 1.2 megawatts of energy to run, enough to power a small town. But the Met Office is to get a new £100million forecasting machine in two year's time after ministers signed off the funding last summer.