Using ECMWF's Forecasts (UEF2022)

The presentation will review forecast product development activities at ECMWF over the past year, in response to user requests and feedback.

The Integrated Forecasting System (IFS) upgrade to Cycle 47r3 in October 2021 included a major upgrade to the moist physics of the model, resulting in more realistic precipitation characteristics. With Cycle 47r3, we introduced several new products,...

ECMWF’s mission for 2021-2030 is to “Deliver global medium-range numerical weather predictions and monitoring of the Earth system to our Member States”. Underpinning this are the values: Collaboration, Integrity, and Passion.
This presentation highlights how work being doing at ECMWF are in line with these. Our integrity and passion have resulted in new model updates and continued leading...

ECMWF carries out a wide-ranging research programme, and this presentation will describe some of the key current foci. Ultimately the goal of the research is to lead to better forecasts, and the talk will include a brief recap of the two operational upgrades introduced over the last year, and a description of the plans for new cycles to exploit the new HPC in Bologna.

I will discuss: (i) recent popular visualisations of climate data aimed at broad public audiences, and (ii) various issues in how we present weather and climate data in scientific graphics.

An overview is given about recent developments in forecast performance of ECMWF's operational forecasting system. Time scales from medium through extended range to seasonal are considered and forecast skill improvements due to recent model upgrades are highlighted. Comparisons with other centres are made, and ECMWF's lead in upper-air and surface forecasts is scrutinized. In addition to...

Many diagnostics of the ECMWF analysis and forecast systems are created using the Diagnostics Toolbox. These are now available to users - to help understand previous seasons and to evaluate new IFS cycles. Work is also progressing on the visualisation of tropical waves and the MJO. Examples of all these diagnostics will be presented, with a view to gauging interest and obtaining feedback.

Meteorological data, commonly visualised in map format, has to satisfy wide-ranging user needs. For example, the needs of the forecasting community and business-critical users tend to be very different to the needs of more passive user categories, such as the public. And in turn user requirements depend also on the variable(s) being displayed. One way to address this complexity, and achieve...

Météo-France is facing a decreasing man-power dedicated to weather forecasting whereas in the meantime more and more weather data become available to the forecasters. Therefore, in the last couple of years, several products and technologies have been developed to quickly visualize those data. One of those technologies is a automated surveillance system that warns forecasters of a possible...

Effective visualisations can take a lot of time and experimentation to get right. Having an interactive environment in which to try out different aspects such as colour schemes can drastically reduce the time required. An interactive environment is also a great way to dynamically explore data, look for features and compare different datasets. On top of this, it can be essential to pre-process...

Advances in numerical weather prediction regularly produce more skilful and far-ranging predictions of the atmospheric state – but at the cost of increased complexity. As resolution becomes finer and ensemble sizes grow, it becomes ever-more difficult to track why a forecast system predicts a certain outcome: despite their basis in theory, our NWP systems often end up being treated simply as...

Floods cause between thousands and tens of thousands fatalities, affect hundreds of millions of people, and cost tens of billions of dollars every year. Google’s Flood Forecasting Initiative aims to provide actionable flood warnings to local agencies, NGOs, and the public, especially in those regions where little to no other warning systems are available. Starting 4 years ago with a small...

Advances in numerical weather prediction mean that model output is more accurate, and with an increasing array of variables and ensembles. It is good to discuss how best to chart this model output to be easily digestible to a wide cross section of forecasters and users.

It is also important to ask what is missing from the model output - the known unknowns – and how to communicate these...

During 2020-2021, the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) received an award from the U.S. Department of Energy to simulate and develop a baseline for weather and climate simulations at 1-km resolution, using the Summit supercomputer, hosted at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF). The ECMWF hydrostatic Integrated...

ECMWF plans to introduce the next major upgrade of its seasonal forecasting system, SEAS6, in 2024. Increased computing resources will allow us to improve the range and structure of the forecasts and supporting re-forecasts. This can be done in various ways - increased ensemble sizes, more frequent issuing of forecasts, longer forecast ranges for ENSO outlooks, and an increased range of years...

Open data has been recognised as one of the main tools to maximise the socio-economic benefits of investments in data production, and forms a key part of the ECMWF Strategy between now and 2030. ECMWF products and weather data in general contribute to a broad range of activities by service providers, and their use enables and enhances the protection of life and property by National Weather...

I am the Founder & CTO at Blue Sky Analytics, a climate-tech startup empowering the world’s decision-makers with accurate, real-time, and standardized climate data. Using AI models, we crunch terabytes of raw satellite data to deliver environmental and climate intelligence like forest fire risk, drought risk, GHG emissions from power plants, air-quality monitoring, and more.
To holistically...

A participatory approach is the foundation for building design solutions that empower citizens, policymakers, experts and non-experts to make informed decisions. Angela Morelli, information designer, co-founder and CEO of InfoDesignLab, will guide us through the journey of co-designing data visualizations that present information in effective ways in order to capture the imagination of an audience.

The Climate Data Store (CDS) is the Copernicus climate change service (C3S) solution to global data delivery and visualisation. Driven by the principles of simplicity and consistency, the CDS provides free access to over 100 datasets for a global interdisciplinary and intersectoral audience of over 100,000 users. Furthermore, the CDS offers online processing facilities and a suite of over 30...

The annual European State of the Climate report represents an occasion to make the most of the climate data produced by the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) and its partners. Both for research and operational purposes, the report covers several essential climate variables (ECVs) and climate indicators to analyse their evolution over time and assess climate variability and change. In...

According to the World Health Organisation, 3.7 million people around the world died in 2012 as a result of outdoor air pollution. In India, according to the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) in India, 43.5% of children have reduced lung function and breathing problems. Air pollution is a major environmental health problem that affects people in developed and developing countries alike....

Aim of the project: Enhance Climate Change Impacts, Mitigation and Adaptation

Area: Lake Kivu basin region

Objectives:
• Create an intervention plan
• Hold stakeholder workshops
• Provide specific recommendations for conservation action
Areas of intervention: The project implementation will include the community empowerment, education and outreach and land and forest restoration

Met.3D (https://met3d.wavestoweather.de) is an open-source research software aiming at making novel interactive 3D and ensemble visualization techniques accessible to the atmospheric community. Since its first public release in 2015, Met.3D has been used in multiple visualization research projects targeted at atmospheric science applications, and has evolved into a feature-rich visual analysis...

A 2006 report by the National Research Council entitled “Completing the Forecast” concluded that uncertainty is a fundamental characteristic of weather prediction, and no forecast is complete without a description of its uncertainty. The Whole Story Uncertainty and Probabilities (WSUP) Viewer is a cloud-based user interface for displaying forecast data not able to be transmitted to the NWS...

Title: Resonance Space VR - Translating Climate Data Into An Interactive Bigdata Sculpture

Authors:

• Alexander Peterhänsel, Media Artist, Professor for Digital Media, Brandenburg University of Applied Sciences
• Daniel Tirelli, Geophysicist, JRC
• Jutta Thielen del-Pozo, Meteorologist, JRC
• Thomas Petroliagkis, Meteorologist, JRC

Presenter:

• Alexander...

An Additive logistic Regression model for large hail was developed based on convective parameters from ERA5 reanalysis, severe weather reports from the European Severe Weather Database (ESWD), and lightning observations from the Met Office Arrival Time Difference network (ATDnet). This model was shown to accurately reproduce the spatial distribution and the seasonal cycle of observed hail...

Social media platforms offer a way to engage with a wide range of people from across all sectors of society. As such they can be an effective way to share the relevance of Earth Observation data (and derived products and services) to everyday life and beyond.

However, using social media platforms effectively can require styles of communication that are not overly familiar to scientists and...

This talk will comes from the heart and mind of a forecaster who has worked for over 35 years trying to predict changeable and sometimes volatile weather coming in from the Atlantic and relaying forecasts and warnings to the public and emergency services. Evelyn will take us from her early days when the forecast for tomorrow was hugely uncertain and data came in painfully slowly on a roller...

Atmospheric fronts are a widely used conceptual model in weather forecasting, most encountered as two-dimensional (2-D) front lines, e.g., on surface analysis charts. The three-dimensional (3-D) dynamical structure of fronts is commonly sketched in 3-D illustrations of idealized weather systems in atmospheric science textbooks. Only recently the feasibility of objective detection and visual...

The importance of visuals in scientific publications has increased in recent years. Not only because nowadays, but we also tend to advertise scientific papers on platforms such as Twitter or Linkedin, where it is always helpful to add a compelling visual to accompany any text. Journals are also increasingly requesting a higher quality in paper graphics. In articles in the meteorological field,...

As of recently, ECMWF started the move towards serving data to users beyond operational forecasters in Member states and commercial customers for a charge, by adopting an open data policy which will be implemented in phases from 2020 to 2025. The first phase included opening hundreds of [web forecast charts][1] and making archived data available under a Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0) open...

Météo-France is facing a decreasing man-power dedicated to weather forecasting whereas in the meantime more and more weather data become available to the forecasters. Therefore, in the last couple of years, several products have been developed to quickly visualize the ensemble forecasts. We have developed bubble and bar charts that are used to detect signals in forecast ensembles but also to...

How the ECMWF Weather Regimes Probabilities chart can support meteorologist in Lombardy to provide more accurate forecast? My thesis paper tries to answer this question. After reproducing the four weather regimes over the Euro-Atlantic area (NAO+, NAO-, BLO, AR), the daily series of occurrence of the regimes 1950-2019 was constructed. The analysis of the series made it possible to derive...