A meso-scale ensemble system focusing on short range probabilistic forecasts and profiting from advanced multi-scale ALARO physics. Its main purpose is to provide probabilistic forecast on daily basis for the national weather services of RC LACE partners. It also serves as a reliable source of probabilistic information applied to downstream hydrology and energy industry.
The system is going to higher resolution and finer scales. The horizontal and vertical resolutions are being increased to 5 km and 60 levels, respectively.
It runs operationally on the High Performance Computer Facility at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) twice a day with the integration starting at 00:00 and 12:00 UTC producing 72 h forecasts (Wang et al., 2010b). The ensemble consists of 1 unperturbed control run and 16 perturbed members involving initial condition uncertainty, model error.