To create a global NWP system from this code you would need observations (soundings, SST, satellite measurements) as well as a super computer.

WCOSS (Tide & Gyre): IBM iDataPlex/Intel Sandy Bridge/Linux

208 trillion calculations/sec; 10,048 processing cores; 2,590 trillion bytes of storage

[xref: http://www.emc.ncep.noaa.gov/GFS/doc.php#comopesys]

You can get 1.5% of that processing power in a single graphics card now. So in 7 years, we should be able to buy that much power for about $350 :)

Here's a really interesting read about the trials of upgrading to WCOSS: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/...

I'd assumed that 'trials' meant 'snafu in a big software project'.

But actually it's about the butterfly effect making it impossible to get exact agreement between the old and new systems for forecasts longer than about 5 days.

More details here: http://www.nwas.org/committees/waf/new_supercomputer.php

You don't want the "raw sensor data". You need it after it's been processed to the appropriate level, to retrieve geophysically-relevant quantities (like temperatures and wind speeds) from the data that is measured. That is not done by the forecasters.