The importance of atmospheric reanalysis data for the development of climate services in Europe was highlighted in a keynote address presented by ECMWF to the 10th annual meeting of the European Meteorological Society, held on 13-17 September 2010 in Zürich, Switzerland.
The theme of this year's meeting was "High resolution climatology - towards climate change services." The ECMWF keynote presentation provided examples of the use of ECMWF reanalysis data for monitoring recent climate anomalies, including the extreme warming experienced in many parts of the Northern Hemisphere this summer. By comparing surface temperature and precipitation data from ERA-40 and ERA-Interim with conventional climate data records independently derived from station data, it was shown that these latest ECMWF reanalysis products provide increasingly accurate representations of climate variability and trends.
Unlike the conventional records, however, reanalysis produces a complete global view of the climate, encompassing many essential climate variables in a physically consistent framework. In addition, ECMWF reanalysis data can be made available in near-real time, which is an important requirement for timely provision of climate services. A major challenge for the future will be to attach meaningful uncertainty information to the reanalysis data. Planned reanalysis activities at ECMWF will address this challenge, for example, by using ensemble techniques and by providing users access to more information about the input observations used for reanalysis.
A video recording of the 30-minute ECMWF presentation can be viewed at
http://www.multimedia.ethz.ch/conferences/2010/emsecac.
Global anomalies in the mean two-metre temperature (deg C) for July 2010, estimated from ERA-Interim data. Anomalies are relative to the period 1989-2009.