News

Dick Dee, one of the key figures in the development of global weather and climate reanalysis at ECMWF, is leaving the Centre on 28 June on reaching retirement age, but only after overseeing the transition from the hugely successful ERA-Interim to the state-of-the-art ERA5 reanalysis.

OpenIFS at ECMWF has teamed up with the University of Oxford e-Research Centre to enable scientists to run the OpenIFS weather model on thousands of people’s home computers. The OpenIFS@home project was launched on 18 June.

ECMWF is implementing a substantial upgrade of its Integrated Forecasting System today, 11 June 2019, which will significantly improve global medium-range weather forecasts. One of the key novelties in IFS Cycle 46r1 is that it makes data assimilation more continuous.

June 2019 marks the official start of the Year of Polar Prediction’s three-year Consolidation Phase. On 24 and 25 June, three webinars will highlight the achievements of the WMO’s Year of Polar Prediction to date and the challenges that lie ahead.

A first evaluation of data from the Aeolus satellite launched by the European Space Agency in August 2018 has confirmed that the mission’s ground-breaking laser technology can be used to obtain global wind profiles that are very useful to numerical weather prediction.

More than 50 scientists from the European EC-Earth consortium met at ECMWF from 21 to 23 May to discuss how to develop the Earth system model they use to make climate predictions and projections. The EC-Earth model uses ECMWF’s Integrated Forecasting System for the atmosphere–land component.

ECMWF will hold an international workshop from 14 to 16 October 2019 at its headquarters in Reading, UK, to investigate how workflows in Earth sciences can be made more reproducible.

ECMWF upgrades its forecasting system on a regular basis, and one such upgrade is planned for 11 June 2019. Director of Forecasts Florian Pappenberger explained how the changes will improve forecasts in two webinars on 15 and 16 May 2019.

ECMWF held a webinar on the use of radiosonde data in numerical weather prediction on 30 April 2019. The webinar covered measurement techniques, the processing of radiosonde data and uncertainties in the data.

The spring 2019 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.