All Climate Events

Thursday, April 4, 2019. 2:00PM. Aun Aprendo - Earth System modelling at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. Nils Wedi, ECMWF.Sponsored by NOAA GFDL. More information here.

The gradual progress in global numerical weather prediction includes a systematic approach to assess and quantify the associated forecast uncertainty by means of high-resolution ensembles of assimilation and forecasts. This involves simulations with billions of gridpoints, the continuous assimilation of billions of observations, rigorous verification, validation and uncertainty quantification, and it involves increasing model complexity through completing the descriptions of the global water and carbon cycles. The coupling of atmosphere, land-surface, ocean, sea-ice, and waves in ECMWF's Earth-system model requires a careful consideration of the highly varying temporal and spatial scales of the individual processes at the interfaces and their consistent initialisation. All this is necessary to increase the fidelity of daily forecasts and of European Copernicus Services, e.g. through the provision of state-of-the-art atmospheric monitoring services, warning systems for flood and fires, and providing reanalyses. A particular challenge arises from ensuring energy efficiency for these extreme-scale applications. This talk will comprehensively describe the current state-of-the-art in model development at ECMWF, discuss challenges, and sketch the next steps towards accelerating and improving storm-scale Earth-System modelling and assimilation in the coming decade.