The initiative, announced yesterday, will take two years to reach full capacity, but the Bureau of Meteorology's chief information officer, Phil Tannenbaum, said it would significantly boost the computing power to which the agency had access, and increase the accuracy of its forecasts.

It would also underpin work being carried out by the Bureau and its supercomputing project partners, the Australian National University and the CSIRO, on modelling extreme weather and ocean events.

"This will allow us to [create] higher fidelity models that will provide better forecasting, better severe weather warning [capability], better climate analyses," Mr Tannenbaum said.

Mr Tannenbaum said the first phase of the supercomputer would come online in September. Once all upgrades to the system were completed, it would increase the computational power available to the Bureau and ANU researchers by between nine and 12 times.

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