News

The global forecasting system of the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) was successfully upgraded on 9 July, making air quality forecasts more accurate and robust. CAMS is implemented by ECMWF on behalf of the EU.

The ECMWF Annual Report 2018 is now available online. The report reviews improvements in forecast performance, advances in research, the Centre’s contributions to Europe’s Copernicus Earth observation programme, and preparations for the new data centre in Italy.

Registration is open for a workshop at ECMWF on 25 and 26 September to review progress in the development of new I/O techniques for supercomputing at the exascale.

Jean-Noël Thépaut has been appointed as ECMWF’s new Director of Copernicus Services from 1 October 2019, when Juan Garces de Marcilla steps down from the post. Jean-Noël has been a key player in the ECMWF team which has successfully implemented two of the EU’s Copernicus Earth observation services.

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.