Each year thousands of Americans are injured, die or suffer serious financial losses from catastrophic weather conditions such as lightning, flash floods, drought, wind storms, blizzards, hurricanes and tornadoes. Annually, over 6,000 fatalities on U.S. highways and 800 deaths in aviation accidents are weather related. More than half a billion dollars per year is spent preparing for predicted snowstorms that don't occur. The shipping industry suffers significant losses due to route changes based on inaccurate marine weather forecasts.
Farmers sustain billions of dollars in weather-related crop losses each year.
Environmental changes stemming from human activity, such as deforestation and the use of aerosols, are resulting in confusing and often severe weather patterns. Pollution from fossil fuels, industrial waste, agricultural chemicals and auto exhaust is playing havoc with regional and global climates, causing ozone depletion, global warming and other large-scale processes that endanger water supplies, and threaten plant and animal life. Several federal agencies support research to develop more accurate weather forecasting tools and research on regional and global change that rely on the power and speed of high performance computing. In 1989 the National Science FoundationUs Center for Analysis and Prediction of Storms created its 'Advanced Regional Prediction System,' a computational model for forecasting and tracking severe storms via high performance computing. In the Midwest floods of 1993, high performance computers were used to predict where floods would crest each day, helping to guide evacuation plans.