News

ECMWF’s new atmospheric reanalysis, ERA5, will soon provide a detailed global picture of meteorological conditions back to 1979. ECMWF scientist Hans Hersbach has overseen the planning and production of this innovative dataset.

On the occasion of the 93rd Council meeting, ECMWF’s Richard Engelen and Rossana Dragani will deliver a lecture on 4 December 2018 entitled ‘Atmospheric composition in the ECMWF Integrated Forecasting System (IFS)’. The lecture will be live-streamed from 17:15 GMT.

The EU’s Copernicus programme has launched an initiative to support the Paris Agreement stocktaking exercise with a new observation-based service to monitor CO2 emissions resulting from human activities. ECMWF is one of the partners in the initiative.

The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), implemented by ECMWF on behalf of the EU, upgraded its seasonal forecast products on 13 November. Forecasts are now available from five models compared to three before, and one of the original models has been upgraded to a new version.

Python experts from across the world came together at ECMWF on 30 and 31 October 2018 to review progress in developing Python frameworks for Earth system sciences. Nineteen speakers gave updates on recent developments.

The Global Flood Awareness System (GloFAS), for which ECMWF is the computational centre, was upgraded on 14 November to provide improved river flood forecasts across the world. The upgrade is the first after GloFAS became an operational service earlier this year.

The process of moving ECMWF’s data centre to Bologna, Italy, entered a new phase with the release of an Invitation to Tender for ECMWF’s next high-performance computing facility on 12 November 2018.

The Metop-C weather satellite was successfully launched from Europe’s space port in Kourou, French Guiana, on 7 November 2018. It will help to ensure the continuous supply of crucial data to help initialise numerical weather prediction models for years to come.

After nearly four years of developing and testing ECMWF’s new Meteorological Interpolation and Regridding (MIR) software package, its main developer, Pedro Maciel, is happy to certify that it is ready for operations.

Recent work has prepared the ground for ECMWF to assimilate satellite observations providing information on the vertical structure of clouds. This will help to determine the initial conditions on which global weather forecasts are based.