News

2016 was the warmest year on record with global surface air temperatures about 1.3°C above pre-industrial levels, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) run by ECMWF on behalf of the EU.

A new Member State, two major model upgrades, a new ten-year Strategy, two director appointments – 2016 has been rich in developments from which the Centre will benefit for many years to come.

Open data will be in the spotlight during a week of events at ECMWF exploring the potential of freely available weather-related data.

Climate reanalysis has huge benefits for numerical weather prediction (NWP) as well as climate studies, and it can help to shed new light on the pace of global warming, two of ECMWF’s top reanalysis experts have said in separate high-profile interventions.

Dr Andrew Brown has been appointed as ECMWF’s next Director of Research after Professor Erland Källén steps down on 31 July 2017.

ECMWF is making big strides in preparing weather forecasting for the exascale era of supercomputing by improving efficiency and scalability in all parts of the production and dissemination workflow.

ECMWF implemented a new version of its forecasting system on 22 November, which introduces a dynamic sea-ice model and increases the resolution of the ocean model. These and other changes significantly improve the Centre’s weather predictions.

ECMWF is part of a new EU-funded project investigating ways to improve weather and climate predictions in the face of a rapidly changing Arctic climate.

A ground-breaking satellite mission to be launched in late 2017 or early 2018 could herald a step change in the quality of weather forecasts around the globe by providing new wind data, a meeting on tropical modelling held at ECMWF has heard.

EC-Earth, a European consortium which aims to provide reliable climate information, will use ECMWF’s OpenIFS for the atmosphere–land component in future versions of its Earth system model.