Using ECMWF's Forecasts (UEF2019)

The presentation will review forecast product development activities at ECMWF over the past year, in response to user requests and feedback. New forecast outputs include test products to help identify the risk of cold spells over Europe, and the experimental post-processed ‘point rainfall’ which accounts for sub-grid variability and situation- dependent bias. The next model upgrade will...

This presentation will provide updates on strategic projects ECMWF is currently working on and their impact on users of the Centre’s data.
An overview will be given on the move of ECMWF’s computing facilities to Bologna (the BOND Programme). The building work has started, and the operating model is being finalised as well as the way in which the teams in the two locations will work...

An update is given on the evolution of forecast skill of the IFS as seen in headline and supplementary scores, with emphasis on ensemble forecast performance. Comparison with ERA5 and with forecasts from other global models are made to distinguish the effect of model upgrades from changes in atmospheric predictability. The user-oriented supplementary headline score for 2-m temperature which...

Some humanitarian crises are due to the effects of forecastable phenomena such as heatwaves or hurricanes. In principle, it is possible to take forecast-based action in advance of the event, that can reduce the impact or simply accelerate the response. Using ECMWF forecasts effectively in this context is a balance between the timescale of useful action (more can be done to reduce impact with...

Flooding is the most common natural hazard in Bangladesh, occurring annually and causing huge economic losses. There are several reasons that cause flooding-geographical location, topography, monsoon climate etc. The country is located at the downstream of the three big river basins-the Ganges, the Brahmaputra and the Meghna; and during the monsoon period (June to September) transboundary flow...

Weather Impact is specialised in translating meteorological and climate data into user-friendly services. In several countries in Africa and Asia we have developed agricultural applications that use the ensemble forecasts of ECMWF as one of the inputs. One of our main challenges is to translate ensemble forecast data to actable information. Services include:
• Weather forecasts and extreme...

Since crop diseases and pests are highly dependent on weather conditions, various decision support systems are proposed to take into account these meteorological conditions in the modeling of epidemic dynamics and assist farmers in their decision-making. Nevertheless, the atmospheric flow is a chaotic phenomenon and weather forecasts remain uncertain. In recent years, several weather...

Marine forecasts are essential to operational planning, with decisions able to be guided by a host of different weather products spanning a period of days, weeks and even months ahead. The correct selection and subsequent application of these different types of weather products has the potential to save many thousands of dollars per day in operational downtime, however this is only possible...

"The Strength of Ensembles Lies not in Probability Forecasting"
Leonard A Smith, CATS at the London School of Economics @lynyrdsmyth
How can one best use an ensemble forecast system in making decisions in the real world that are influenced by the future weather? Several actual applications will be considered, and some real-time forecasting will be required (interactively) form the audience. It...

The talk will highlight what steps have been taken to ‘develop an integrated global model of the Earth system to produce forecasts with increasing fidelity on time ranges up to one year ahead. This will tackle the most difficult problems in numerical weather prediction such as the currently low level of predictive skill of European weather for a month ahead.’, three years on since the approval...

ECMWF is the computational centre for the European and Global Flood Awareness Systems [EFAS & GloFAS respectively], on behalf of the Copernicus Emergency Management Service. These produce flood forecasts across Europe and the globe with lead times of 10 and 30 days respectively. The aim is to provide flood forecasts at the medium range which are consistent across national boundaries....

In line with its long-term Strategy, ECMWF has recently developed test products for the likelihood of regime transitions associated with the occurrence of severe cold spells, and for the probabilities of occurrence of sudden stratospheric warmings and weather regimes. The aim is to identify the main weather regimes in the Euro-Atlantic region and to predict the probability that future weather...

In this presentation, different Météo-France applications based on the main operationnal ensemble prediction systems will be presented.

On the one hand it must be stressed that french forecaster use these operational ensembles every day, from very short- to medium-range.
On the other hand several ongoing studies investigate the feasibility of using ensemble weather forecasting for...

DWD is planning to launch a new product which provides warning information summarized in a graphical seven day outlook for high impact weather in Germany. The outlook comprises daily charts for the various hazard types – e.g. severe rainfall, wind gusts or snow fall. In the initial phase, forecasters will generate these maps by hand with the meteorological workstation system NinJo. In parallel...

Progressive warnings with conservative forecasting
Elín Björk Jónasdóttir, Group leader of Weather Services
Icelandic Meteorological Office

At the Icelandic Meteorological Office the use of Ensemble forecasts had a relatively slow start. The original resolution of the ENS system, along with limited resources was at first the main reason for IMO forecasters not to dive into the world of...

Some days, the atmosphere is less predictable than on average. This is partly because the rate of growth of certainty (the result of Chaos) is dependent on the atmospheric flow itself. For example, moist processes are almost always implicated during investigations of very poor forecasts for Europe (so-called "forecast busts"). These moist processes might be associated with, for example, warm...

ECMWF operates two Copernicus services, the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) and the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) and due to Copernicus’ open data policy, many datasets on climate, air quality, fire, or floods are available free of charge.

However, data accessibility is still one of the biggest obstacles for users of these data. Users face difficulties in downloading...

On July 23 2018, Greece experienced the second deadliest natural disaster of its modern history. Early in the afternoon, a wildfire broke up in the region of Ntaou on Penteli Mountain, approximately 20 km northeast of the city of Athens and 5 km off the Eastern Attica coast. Assisted by the prevailing meteorological conditions, characterized by high temperature, very low humidity and locally...

The Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) is an international organization located in Vienna, Austria. Its main task is to establish a global verification regime to monitor compliance with the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT), which bans all nuclear explosions. The Commission has developed an atmospheric transport modelling (ATM)...

As part of implementing the EU-funded Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), ECMWF is producing the ERA5 reanalysis of the global weather and climate. Production is complete for the period 1979 to the present, and an extension back to 1950 is currently in production. ERA5 replaces the highly successful ERA-Interim reanalysis that was started in 2006 and spans the period from 1979 to the...

The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) operationally provides forecasts from state-of-the-art individual seasonal prediction systems, as well as multi-system combination products. Graphical and data products, covering a time period of six months, are free and fully available through the C3S website and Climate Data Store (CDS) on a monthly basis at 12 UTC on the 13th.
The centres...

Arctic cyclones (ACs) are low pressure systems that develop in the Arctic region. ACs developed in summer have a long lifetime and wander around the North Pole. In this study, we investigated the impact of horizontal and vertical resolutions on prediction of 13 ACs occurred in summer (June–August) from 2008 to 2018, using an ECMWF OpenIFS model. We conducted 11-member ensemble predictions for...

The Atmospheric Transport Modelling (ATM) operational system deployed and used at CTBTO produces source receptor sensitivity (SRS) fields, which specify the location of the air masses prior to their arrival at any radionuclide station of the International Monitoring System (IMS) network. Currently the ATM operational system is based on a Lagrangian Particle Dispersion Model, FLEXPART, driven...

51 members ECMWF ensemble forecast were widely applied into more than 500 wind farm energy forecast over different kinds of terrain in China. A proper post-processing of 51 members were found to be a key for improving the wind forecast accuracy. A new classification method were developed for post-processing of ensemble forecast. The new method performance were verified using wind turbine observation.

Bora is a gusty downslope northeast wind that blows at the eastern Adriatic coast and similar winds exist at many other places on all continents. At coastal mountain lee areas, hurricane speeds of Bora are not unusual, but the event that occurred on February 23rd 2019. breaks several records, with maximum gust of 103 knots observed in Makarska.
There has been substantial progress in Bora...

On the 17th of December 2018, excessive rainfall was severe in Ovacık (Kemer) district of Antalya, which caused material damage only. The system was effective especially in western parts of Antalya, while the rainfall amount of 490.8 kg/m2 was measured in Ovacık AWOS at 1131 m altitude in between 24 hours. This value has been recorded as the highest daily total value measured in Turkey so far....

Météo-France provides forecast products tailored to end-users from energy, agriculture, transports, insurance and other sectors.

A number of end-users are still quite reluctant in the use of ensemble forecast and prefer to rely on a deterministic answer to manage their activities.
Though, the rise of medium and short range ensemble forecasts allow weather providers to create new diagnostics...

MeteoSwiss as a national met service commits itself to provide weather forecasts for arbitrary locations in Switzerland and also to adequately communicate forecast uncertainty. While in the past such information has been communicated mostly in text form, MeteoSwiss tries to increasingly use such uncertainty information in all products. We rely on ensemble predictions as a data source, both on...

The main goal of the ECMWF Special Project SPITCAPE 2016-2018 is to understand the information content of the current ensemble systems both at global and meso scales in re-forecasting past high-impact weather events. In particular one of the main questions addressed in the project is: what is the added value of running a high-resolution (namely convection-permitting) ensemble for high-impact...

Cette étude est une évaluation sommaire de la prévision d’ensemble du modèle ECMWF et de GEFS pour la période humide du 27 au 31 août 2018 afin de déceler le meilleur modèle. Pour ce faire, nous avons fait appel aux météogrammes d’ensemble d’ECMWF sur onze (11) régions du Sénégal et pour le modèle GEFS de faire recours aux probabilités de dépassement des seuils de 5mm et 10mm. Ces sorties de...

The weather in the midlatitudes and its extremes are governed by the passage of extratropical cyclones. The conceptual model developed through inspecting specific case studies related three main features to cyclones: 1. Fronts, 2. Dry-air intrusions (DIs), and (3) the Warm conveyor belts (WCBs).

A climatological study quantifying the co-occurrence of fronts and DIs (Raveh-Rubin and Catto,...

Arctic cyclones (ACs) are a severe atmospheric phenomenon that affects the Arctic environment. This study assesses the forecast skills of 5 leading operational medium-range ensemble forecasts (CMC, ECMWF, JMA, NCEP and UKMO) and an ensemble reforecast at NOAA for extraordinary ACs that occurred in summer during 1986–2016. Twenty-six (ten) extraordinary ACs in summer during 1986–2016...

The importance of seasonal forecasts especially for the developing sectors in recent years cannot be ignored. Therefore, ECMWF seasonal forecasts are used, a more useful ensemble system perspective for 15 points representing whole Turkey has been developed and the seasonal forecasts has become more convenient to be used by the various sectors, in this study. With the developed method, ECMWF...

The effective construction and use of ensembles along with the need to provide seamless continuity across spatial scales and temporal evolution have become major challenges for weather forecasting through to climate prediction in recent years. Real tangible benefits are expected if we get this right. In terms of ensemble forecasting, the Met Office has invested hugely in the development of the...

A poster demonstrating the use of the Harmonie-Arome short-range ensemble forecasting system at Met Éireann to improve short range prediction of high-impact weather events in Ireland using case studies.IREPS was initially inspired by experimentation with high resolution ensemble prediction at ECMWF.

Nowadays there is a profound increase in the number of natural disasters attributed to extreme weather events which is significantly impeding progress towards sustainable development. In dealing with a risk of an emergency threatening life or property, a weather-forecast office would use a range of forecast tools to assess the threat and provide the necessary forecasts and warnings. In this...

The deterministic approach to weather prediction does not allow to
establish a-priori the degree of skill of an individual forecast;
instead, probabilistic forecasts provide a more complete, reliable and
accurate view of what could happen in the future, ideally providing
information on the relative frequency of an event occurring.
Therefore, they bring definite benefits for...

Extremely heavy rainfall events occurred over western Japan in early July 2018. This study assesses the predictability of these events for the period 5th–7th July using three operational medium-range ensemble forecasts available from the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA), and the National Centers for Environmental Prediction...

Central Mediterranean cyclones which are originated in North Atlantic and reach to the Mediterranean Sea or form in the Gulf of Genoa affect western and southwestern parts of Turkey. These cyclones cause strong winds, heavy showers and strong thunderstorms with torrential rain storms in southwest coasts. In winter, Central Mediterranean cyclones cause heavy snow showers in the central parts...

The use of EPS products has a long history at the Hungarian Meteorological Service (OMSZ).
New products have been developed for forecasters even in recent months. Yet, the probability approach has not been introduced in the online and offline media forecasts in Hungary, hence these outputs only rarely reach the public in a direct way. Although there would be a demand for ensemble forecasts by...

IMPROVER is a new post-processing system under development by the Met Office to provide seamless probabilistic forecasts from 1h to 2 weeks ahead blending different NWP inputs including convective-scale UK models and ensembles and the ECMWF ENS (Roberts and Mylne, 2019 – UEF presentation). These forecasts are updated hourly to incorporate frequent model update cycles into the blend and present...

Ensembles can provide additional information on a variety of time frames when forecasting for applications. Hourly ECMWF ensemble data became available in October 2018: we take a look at how its affected short-term wind power generation forecasting. Seasonal forecasts for Europe seem often increase in skill between a lead time of front month and month ahead: at what lead time does that skill...

Météo-France has launched a significant project to modernize its base-line production using ensemble forecast as input data.
This project called 3P includes three parts that adress
the constitution of the reference database (that will be used in all the production line),
the use of ensemble forecast by the forecasters in operation
the constitution of new products with a good overview of...

Typical map based ensemble visualisations have various shortcomings. Plotting the ensemble members in separate small postage stamp maps reveals all the information about the parameters shown, but it is difficult to compare the locations of weather phenomena between the maps. Probability plots make it easy to see how many ensemble members predict a phenomenon at any map location, but require...

An accurate prediction of severe and high-impact weather events is the core task of the DWD. Public authorities (Home ministry, Flood response agencies, Civil defence) as well as internal DWD units are vital interested to get tailored related alerts already for the medium range time scale. For relief organisations (Emergency management, the Red Cross etc.) forecasts on a global scale are...

We present the way MeteoSwiss’ forecasters use ECMWF’s ensemble forecast on daily base. We show, how medium and long range weather forecasts are developed, which products are used and according to which criteria a guidance or a monthly outlook is written.

The road meteorology is a regular and one of the crucial parts of winter weather forecasting at the Czech Hydrometeorological Institute. In order to properly predict road weather conditions, an accurate precipitation type forecast is essential. During February 2019, we focused on the ECMWF Probability of precipitation type product (ecCharts) aiming to determine its reliability during two...