News

ECMWF will soon provide global forecasts of one of the most spectacular phenomena in the atmosphere: lightning. Predictions cannot be made for individual flashes, but forecasts for average lightning activity can have useful skill up to several days ahead.

Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-S (GOES-S) will be the second in a series of new, advanced geostationary satellites designed to give higher resolution data, delivered more rapidly to forecasting centres such as ECMWF.

ECMWF invites users of its forecasts and products to submit abstracts for the ‘Using ECMWF’s Forecasts’ meeting from 5 to 8 June 2018. The programme will include talks and keynote addresses to stimulate discussion and interactive sessions to encourage networking.

The 2018 HEPEX workshop in Melbourne, Australia, was themed ‘breaking the barriers’ to highlight the challenges facing researchers and practitioners and how they can be overcome.

Phil Browne trained as an applied mathematician before joining ECMWF to help develop a key aspect of operational numerical weather prediction (NWP): coupled ocean–atmosphere data assimilation. He sets out the challenges involved and how he is addressing them.

More than 50 experts from Europe and beyond met at ECMWF from 5 to 7 February 2018 to chart the way forward for an ambitious project working towards an operational capacity to monitor fossil fuel CO2 emissions.

EC-Earth, a European consortium which aims to provide reliable climate information, is in the final stages of preparing for a climate model intercomparison project expected to feed into the next IPCC report, a meeting hosted by ECMWF has heard.

More than 50 ocean and data assimilation experts came together at ECMWF from 22 to 25 January to discuss the way forward for the use of observations of sea-surface temperature (SST) and sea ice in numerical weather prediction (NWP) and climate applications.

Developing a 4D variational data assimilation system was one of ECMWF’s biggest-ever projects. A symposium to mark the 20th anniversary of the operational implementation of 4D-Var took place at the Centre on 26 January.

The winter 2017/18 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.