Irina Sandu and François Massonnet (Université Catholique de Louvain) discuss polar observations, their impact on forecasting, and how the development of observing systems goes hand in hand with the development of numerical prediction systems.
Science blog
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8 January 2021
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18 December 2020Sean Healy has had a crazy year – and for a change we are not talking about COVID. Despite the restrictions of working from home, Sean and colleagues at the Centre have achieved remarkable progress in the use of data from global satellite navigation systems to improve our forecasts.
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6 November 2020ECMWF Fellow Louise Nuijens is daydreaming about a field campaign in Barbados earlier this year. Working with us, she is analysing the observations that were collected there, to understand how clouds affect and are affected by the wind.
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26 October 2020Julia Wagemann and Esperanza Cuartero discuss the exciting developments from this summer's ESoWC, which gives developers the opportunity to work with ECMWF mentors to solve a range of challenges facing the Centre.
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1 October 2020Colleagues from the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology join with ECMWF staff to discuss improvements in our understanding of how aerosols, clouds and radiation affect the monsoon rains of southern West Africa.
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15 September 2020Given that data assimilation is such a central aspect of ECMWF’s work, Geir Evensen was invited to present a seminar and a blog covering his work on its use in modelling aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic.
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21 August 2020Emmanuel Rouges and Nikolaos Mastrantonas are investigating predictability on the challenging sub-seasonal (or extended-range) timescale, focusing on extreme conditions over Europe, as part of the EU CAFE project.
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22 June 2020Nils Wedi describes the first ever 1 km seasonal timescale simulation of the atmosphere, run on the fastest computer in the world (as of November 2019). Modelling weather in such unprecedented detail is offering exciting opportunities to advance weather and climate prediction, and the testing of new satellite observations.
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19 May 2020Jonny Day and Gabriele Arduini discuss how they are using Finnish Meteorological Institute observations at a snow-covered boreal site in Lapland to improve the ECMWF snow model and forecasts in Northern Europe.
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28 April 2020ECMWF’s first science and art exhibition proved a great success. It demonstrated the importance of art as a way of engaging an audience, stimulating dialogue and encouraging the creativity which is at the heart of the Centre's scientific excellence.
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6 April 2020David Lavers relates his experience on a research aircraft flight to observe atmospheric rivers and the benefits such observations can bring to forecasts of precipitation and flooding.
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5 March 2020After spending a week at the ambitious EUREC4A observing campaign, Irina Sandu shares her excitement about how this major German-French led international effort can change our understanding of the coupling between clouds and circulation, and their representation in weather and climate models.
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14 January 2020Polly Schmederer looks at how measurements from observational super-sites are helping to better understand errors in forecasts of near-surface temperature.
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12 November 2019Exciting improvements in modelling convective precipitation are being achieved through the collaboration of visiting scientist Tobias Becker, from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, with ECMWF’s Irina Sandu and Peter Bechtold.
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11 October 2019To mark the UN International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction on 13 October, Linus Magnusson discusses ECMWF forecasts of tropical cyclones and the destructive floods that can result.
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17 September 2019Following a recent workshop, Peter Dueben discusses recent progress and future possibilities in the application of machine learning to weather and climate prediction.
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15 August 2019Stephen English explains why, in a world hungry for the use of radio frequencies in new applications, the meteorological community needs to be clear about their critical value for weather prediction.
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26 July 2019As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the first Moon landing, Philippe Lopez investigates whether the ECMWF forecasting model can reproduce the detailed cloud patterns captured in those early, iconic images of planet Earth from space.
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10 June 2019The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility in the US is home to “Summit”, the world’s fastest computer. After his recent trip there, Nils Wedi discusses some of the latest advances in supercomputing and considers their application to numerical weather prediction.