Find out about us: who are we?

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Background and funding

We are an intergovernmental organisation supported by 34 States.

ECMWF's basic document is its Convention, which defines its objectives and the functions of its Council and Director-General.

The objectives of the Centre include the provision of medium-range forecasts to the meteorological offices of its Member States and Co-operating States, maintaining a data archive, assistance in advanced education, and assistance to the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) in implementing its programmes.

The budgeted contributions from Member States and Co-operating States for 2013 are £41.4 million. The scale of contribution of each State is according to their Gross National Income (GNI).

Our Member States are:

Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom .

We have concluded co-operation agreements with:

Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Hungary, Israel, Latvia, Lithuania, Montenegro, Morocco, Romania, Serbia and Slovakia.

Co-operation agreements have also been concluded with:

• World Meteorological Organisation (WMO)
• European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT)
• African Centre of Meteorological Applications for Development (ACMAD)
• Joint Research Centre (JRC)
• Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty Organisation (CTBTO)
• Executive Body of the Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution (CLRTAP)
• European Space Agency (ESA)

Summary of our strategy for 2011-2020

Note: The full ECMWF Strategy document is available in Programmatic Documents.

A Strategy for ECMWF for the period 2011 to 2020 was adopted unanimously by the ECMWF Council in June 2011. In summary:

Goals

The principal goal of ECMWF in the next ten years is to improve its global, medium-range weather forecasting systems, at the current rapid rates, in order to:

• Provide Member States' National Meteorological Services with reliable forecasts of severe weather across the medium-range.
• Meet Member States' requirements for high quality near-surface weather forecast products such as precipitation, wind and temperature.

Complementary goals are:

• Improve the quality of monthly and seasonal-to-interannual forecasts.
• Support climate monitoring with state-of-the-art reanalyses of the Earth-system.
• Contribute towards the optimisation of the Global Observing System.
• Enhance support to Member States’ national forecasting activities by providing suitable boundary conditions for limited-area models.
• Deliver global analyses and forecasts of atmospheric composition.

Strategy

ECMWF will sustain effort on consolidating its existing tools, improving the Integrated Forecasting System (IFS) and making optimal use of observations, particularly from satellite systems. It will continue developing a fully coupled, modular Earth-system model, comprising all components relevant for the time scales of its missions (from medium-range to seasonal time scale).

The strategy to achieve those goals flows naturally from the Centre's responsibilities, capabilities and opportunities, and entails

• The resolution of all forecasting systems will be increased regularly (pending available computing power).
• The calibration of probabilistic forecasts from the ensemble prediction system will be pursued through a programme of systematic re-forecasts.
• The representation of initial and model uncertainty in ensemble prediction will be improved through extensive research programmes on ensemble data assimilation and stochastic physics.
• The added value of multi-model systems for severe weather forecasting will be assessed.
• New products such as a global extreme forecast index, or the probability of freak ocean waves, will be developed.
• Verification techniques focused on severe weather events will be developed.
• Finally, the needs of Member States regarding timeliness and frequency of global forecasts and boundary conditions for limited area, high-resolution models will be regularly reviewed and addressed.

Benefits

In addition to the benefits already provided by the Centre's activities, the projected improvements in forecast accuracy and forecast products will bring substantial further benefits to European governments, economies and civil society. These benefits will be realised by drawing on extensive collaboration across Europe in which the National Meteorological Services will play a prominent and expanding role.

The vision guiding this strategy is that European citizens will continue to receive the very best meteorological forecasting services at all ranges, particularly regarding severe weather. The superiority already achieved in global and local numerical weather prediction will be maintained and extended to other aspects of the environment. This will guarantee optimal return on the large investment made in observing systems, particularly in meteorological and environmental satellites. Benefits will accrue to all sectors of European economy and society and to the entire Earth-observation community.