Virtual Workshop: Warm Conveyor Belts – a challenge to forecasting

In this presentation the key features of warm conveyor belts that need to be observed to characterise them correctly in the analysis are recalled. This includes the warm conveyor belt itself, with features such as elongated cloud bands, spiral and hook cloud formations, areas of intense latent heating and surface precipitation. But also associated features such as the dry intrusion and the...

Microwave radiances sensitive to water vapour, cloud and precipitation are assimilated in all-sky conditions with benefit to ECMWF forecasts into the medium range. In terms of an adjoint-based sensitivity measure (Forecast Sensitivity to Observation impact, FSOI) these observations provide around 20 % of all observational impact on the short-range forecast, so they are now one of the most...

Spaceborne radars have the potential to provide profiles of precipitation, clouds and winds within cloudy systems that are inaccessible from other satellite techniques. The reflectivity profiles from the nadir pointing cloud radar on CloudSat launched in 2006 have provided the first global data sets of cloud ice content within clouds and precipitation rates with 500m vertical and 1km...