ECMWF’s 50th anniversary celebratory events continued in the historic city of Bologna, Italy, from 15 to 19 September 2025.
Following celebrations held earlier this year in Bonn, Germany (7–11 April), the week brought together colleagues and partners from around the world for a programme reflecting on the past, present and future of forecasting, high-performance computing, and environmental monitoring.
Alongside the user and scientific meetings and workshops, members of the press also visited ECMWF’s Bologna data centre to hear more about how we collaborate with our Member and Co-operating States and how our work impacts both academia and industry.
A reception event was held to welcome delegates and thank staff and partners, with speeches from Florence Rabier (Director-General, ECMWF), Anna Lisa Boni (Deputy Mayor of Bologna, Comune di Bologna), General Giuseppe Addesa (Head of Military Aviation and Meteorology Division, Aeronautica Italia), and Vincenzo Colla (Vice President of the Emilia Romagna Regione). Our thanks to the Emilia Romagna Regione for their support with these events.
Anna Lisa Boni, General Giuseppe Addesa, Vincenzo Colla and Florence Rabier (left to right) delivered speeches to welcome guests and thank staff and partners at the reception event.
21st Workshop on HPC in meteorology
ECMWF’s biennial workshop on high-performance computing (HPC) has long provided a forum for experts from national weather centres, academia and industry to share advances and explore the transformative role of supercomputing for weather forecasting applications.
This year’s event took place from 15 to 19 September. It was attended by over 200 delegates and featured 70 presentations and posters. It was a timely opportunity, in ECMWF’s 50th year, to reflect on how HPC has driven progress in weather forecasting, environmental monitoring and extreme event prediction.
With the theme of “Exploring the Past, Present and Future of HPC in Meteorology”, a range of presentations from national meteorology centres, national meteorological and hydrological services, and updates from ECMWF, provided the delegates with a comprehensive overview of how computing services have evolved over the decades and the scientific impact achieved. Discussions also focused on the future directions in computational meteorology and how services will need to evolve to meet new challenges facing meteorology communities, including the advances and use of artificial intelligence in weather forecasting.
On 16 September, joint sessions were held with the Destination Earth Annual Meeting, bringing together perspectives from the European Commission, European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU), leading supercomputer centres and ECMWF. The talks explored a number of topics, including the advancement of AI supercomputing, the development and implementation of digital twin technology and the convergence of HPC, AI and quantum and how these innovations provide societal benefits.
Using ECMWF's Forecasts (UEF2025)
Held at the Regione Emilia-Romagna premises and ECMWF’s purpose-built data centre, at the Tecnopolo di Bologna, between 15 and 18 September, UEF2025 provided a setting for over 120 participants and forecast users from around the world to exchange ideas, give feedback, and share experiences.
The 2025 theme, “Exploring the Past, Present and Future of ECMWF Forecast Products and Services”, examined the evolution of ECMWF forecast products and services, highlighting five decades of progress from the first operational forecasts in 1979 to today’s advances in machine learning, open data, and new forecast products.
Collaboration with Member and Co-operating States has been central to this success, providing valuable input, ideas and expertise and delivering societal benefits.
The concurrent running of multiple events provided an excellent opportunity to bring together forecast end users and technical HPC experts through a joint session with the 21st Workshop on HPC, on 17 September, to explore crossover topics. The session opened with an engaging keynote from Dr Franck Cappello (Argonne National Laboratory), followed by a stimulating panel discussion that also included insights from Prof. Katherine Yellick (UC Berkeley).
Throughout the week, there were 35 presentations and a poster session showcasing different uses of ECMWF products from past to present as well as plans and ideas for the future. Additionally, a range of ice-breaker activities provided an excellent opportunity for the different communities to gain a better perspective on future service requirements. This included an interactive event, "Weather Stations – Learn, Discuss, Make Connections" which demonstrated the various ECMWF products and functionality and encouraged participants to exchange insights and strengthen collaborations with fellow users and ECMWF staff. A number of excellent 3D visualisation demonstrations were also delivered over the entire five days by Andreas Müller.
At the UEF2025, an interactive event "Weather Stations – Learn, Discuss, Make Connections" demonstrated various ECMWF products and functionality and participants exchanged insights with fellow users and ECMWF staff.
3rd ECMWF Destination Earth Annual Meeting
ECMWF colleagues and partners gathered for the 3rd Destination Earth (DestinE) Annual Meeting, hosted at DAMA - Tecnopolo di Bologna and online, on 16 and 17 September.
Almost 100 participants from across Europe exchanged ideas, shared progress, and looked ahead to future steps in this ambitious European Commission initiative to build digital twins of the Earth system.
The two-day meeting provided an update on the development of the Climate and Extremes Digital Twins, the Digital Twin Engine, Artificial Intelligence in DestinE as well as user applications, and showcased what has been achieved so far. These efforts are led by the European Commission’s Directorate General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (DG CNECT), and are highly collaborative, involving more than 100 institutions in science, research, technology and national meteorological services from across Europe, along with supercomputing power provided by EuroHPC JU.
Sessions explored how the Digital Twins can be used in practice, with developers presenting usage scenarios and synergies, and users sharing perspectives through pilot services and demonstrator pitches.
Across the two days, there were eight presentations, three panel discussions and a world café event on "What-if scenarios".
The meeting concluded with a forward-looking discussion on future needs and the long-term outlook for the initiative.
European Weather Cloud (EWC) User Workshop 2025
For the first time, the European Weather Cloud (EWC) User Workshop took place in-person, co-organised by ECMWF and EUMETSAT on 18 September bringing together users, developers and service providers. This full-day event featured 13 presentations and was attended by over 70 participants, with around half attending in Bologna and the rest joining online in a new hybrid format. The workshop enabled users to explore the developments, share experiences, and help shape the future of the EWC as key infrastructure for data access and collaboration.
The event began with presentations covering the current state of the EWC, the latest updates and forthcoming developments. A key highlight was the launch of the EWC Community Hub, a new platform designed to make it easier for users to share and access open-source resources alongside a demonstration of the EWC Command Line Interface (CLI) to interact with EWC services. Both were warmly welcomed as valuable steps toward building a stronger, more connected community.
User case studies explored how EWC resources are being utilised in practice in research and operations. Speakers from the University of Cologne, for example, demonstrated how the EWC supports satellite-based deep learning projects while MeteoSwiss shared its experience of EWC adding value to real-time processing of ground-based atmospheric observations. Other talks ranged from exploring extreme weather across Europe to predicting future runoff from the Greenland Ice Sheet with AI tools and how ECMWF’s new “Forecast-In-A-Box” is delivering fast, on-demand data-driven weather forecasts.
These talks underlined the EWC’s growing role as a shared, flexible infrastructure where scientists and institutions can collaborate, experiment, and make better use of weather and climate data.
The meeting concluded with an engaging open discussion with service providers and users on feedback and future priorities, including the need for continuous availability to support operational workloads, Improved tools for access management and stable storage solutions and backup options.
Catch up with the events
Presentations and recordings are available on the event webpages. A photograph album is also available on Flickr.
Final events in 2025
The final series of 50th anniversary events will take place in Reading, UK, from 1–3 December 2025, including:
- ECMWF Member States machine learning pilot project meeting
- Showcase of European capabilities in machine learning in weather forecasting
- Gala evening
For further information, see the ‘Anniversary’ page.