News

As ex-hurricane Ophelia hurtled towards Ireland in October 2017, the sky over parts of Europe turned red. ECMWF scientist Melanie Ades works on the satellite observations that help us to understand why.

World Meteorological Day 2018 is dedicated to the risks related to weather and water events and climate change: we need to be weather-ready, climate-smart, and water-wise, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) says.

Weather data collected by radiosondes launched in the Arctic in February and March 2018 as part of the Year of Polar Prediction are feeding into ECMWF forecasts. The availability of such observations is significant as this region is normally only sparsely observed.

Registration is now open for the biennial workshop on high-performance computing in meteorology to take place at ECMWF from 24 to 28 September 2018. The meeting will cover a wide range of issues with a particular focus on scalability and I/O.

Women are still sorely underrepresented in science globally. On the occasion of International Women’s Day, we look at the achievements of some of the women driving forward weather science at ECMWF.

ECMWF will soon provide global forecasts of one of the most spectacular phenomena in the atmosphere: lightning. Predictions cannot be made for individual flashes, but forecasts for average lightning activity can have useful skill up to several days ahead.

Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-S (GOES-S) will be the second in a series of new, advanced geostationary satellites designed to give higher resolution data, delivered more rapidly to forecasting centres such as ECMWF.

ECMWF invites users of its forecasts and products to submit abstracts for the ‘Using ECMWF’s Forecasts’ meeting from 5 to 8 June 2018. The programme will include talks and keynote addresses to stimulate discussion and interactive sessions to encourage networking.

The 2018 HEPEX workshop in Melbourne, Australia, was themed ‘breaking the barriers’ to highlight the challenges facing researchers and practitioners and how they can be overcome.

Phil Browne trained as an applied mathematician before joining ECMWF to help develop a key aspect of operational numerical weather prediction (NWP): coupled ocean–atmosphere data assimilation. He sets out the challenges involved and how he is addressing them.