News

The Italian Ambassador in London, His Excellency Pasquale Terracciano, and the Scientific attaché, Prof. Roberto di Lauro, were at ECMWF on 6 June 2014. This was the first visit by an Italian Ambassador since ECMWF was established in 1975.

The Director-General, Prof. Alan Thorpe, highlighted the important role of Italy as one of ECMWF’s Member States in providing the resources needed to develop research and operational programmes.

ECMWF hosted the 2014 meeting of the Waves In Shallow water Environment group (WISE), which took place from 8 to 12 June.

Using a modern analysis and forecasting system, ECMWF revisits the meteorology of the D-Day period.

A meeting of the NEMO Waves Working Group, hosted by ECMWF on 13 and 14 May, brought together the majority of the scientific groups currently active in Europe on wave-ocean modelling.

Exceptionally intense rainfalls from 13^th May onwards following weeks of wet conditions led to disastrous and wide spread flooding in the Balkans, in particular Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia. Critical flooding was also reported in other countries including Southern Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. The events in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia are reported to be the worst since more than 100 years. 44 casualties have been reported so far for both countries, also one person died due to the floods in Croatia and in the Czech Republic.

Vienna was recently the host of yet another highly successful European Geophysical Union General Assembly from 28 April to 2 May 2014.

This prominent annual event is a collaborative enterprise that brings together geoscientists from all over the world and covers all disciplines of the Earth, Planetary and Space Sciences. ECMWF was very present, from convening sessions to presenting on a broad spectrum of our work.

Last week saw the first bilateral meeting between the China Meteorological Administration (CMA) and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) since both organisations signed a Co-operation Agreement in early 2014.

The CMA delegation attending the 23–24th April discussion at ECMWF headquarters in Reading included:

Yokohama, 31 March 2014 – The IPCC’s Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, a comprehensive assessment report by leading scientists launched here today, offers policymakers and the general public a wealth of information about how climate change will affect the lives of current and future generations – and what governments can do to adapt and reduce vulnerabilities.

The challenges of highly parallel computing in areas such as observational data processing, data assimilation, the formulation of the model dynamical core and model output management have led to the development of a Scalability Programme at ECMWF. The project will coordinate resources defining the future forecasting system across all scales. This will be in preparation for future high-performance computing architectures aiming at accurate, efficient and scalable algorithms and code structures.

From 26 March to 1 April, ECMWF staff co-organised and attended the 19th International TOVS Study Conference (ITSC) on Jeju Island, South Korea. The conference is held every 18 to 24 months and this year was hosted in impressive fashion by the Korean Meteorological Administration (KMA).