News

ECMWF news highlights in 2023 include a major upgrade of the forecasting system; initiatives to drive forward weather science, including developments in machine learning; and news from the EU-funded services implemented by ECMWF.

Jean-Noël Thépaut, who started his career at ECMWF in the early 1990s and rose to become the Director of the two EU Copernicus services run at the Centre, is leaving us at the end of this year on reaching retirement age.

The second phase of the Destination Earth (DestinE) initiative was confirmed on 13 December 2023 by the European Union and unanimously endorsed by the Councils of the three implementing entities delivering DestinE.

CATRINE, an EU-funded project coordinated by ECMWF, will improve the numerical aspects of the transport of atmospheric tracers, with an emphasis on long-lived greenhouse gases. It will support an operational anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions Monitoring and Verification Support Capacity.

ECMWF supports the UN’s Systematic Observations Financing Facility (SOFF) to widen the provision of weather observations in some countries, notably by agreeing to supply its forecasts to SOFF participants.

Recent investigations suggest that the equations ECMWF uses to forecast the global weather may not have to be updated to much more computationally demanding ones as long as the weather model’s horizontal grid spacing is no smaller than 2.8 km.

Rebecca Emerton is part of a team that tries to improve ECMWF’s weather model by looking for the causes of errors. She is also helping the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service, which is implemented by ECMWF, to draw up its yearly review of the climate.

Data assimilation is the combination of the latest observations with a short-range forecast to obtain the best possible estimate of the current state of the Earth system. Machine learning can contribute to it by optimising the use of satellite observations.

Over 140 people attended ECMWF’s 20th Workshop on High-Performance Computing in Meteorology in Bologna, Italy, from 9 to 13 October 2023, and nearly 170 registered online. The theme was ‘Diversifying HPC’.

The autumn 2023 issue of the ECMWF Newsletter is now available. As well as news about ECMWF staff and events, it features articles about new developments and the use that can be made of ECMWF products.