Minutes of 24th Annual Meeting of the Working Group on Co-operation Between European Forecasters (WGCEF) Monday 12th – Tuesday 13th of November 2018 BY14 Hotel in Tel Aviv By Christian Csekits, ZAMG (chair) and Jos Diepeveen KNMI (vice-chair) LAINE, Mikko - FMI/Finland PALJAK, Taimi - Estonian Weather Service PATERSON, Laura - UK Met Office/Great Britain PATKAI , Zsolt - OMSZ/Hungary RAZY, Alissa - Israel Meteorological Service REY, Jaime - AEMET/Spain ROULET, Bernard - Meteo-France SANDEV, Marjan - Czech Hydrometeorologi- cal Institute SAVIR, Amit - Israel Meteorological Service SKELBAEK, Michael - DMI/Denmark STAV, Nir - Director of Israel Meteorological Service TROISI, Antonio - Italian Meteorological Service VANHAMEL, Thomas - RMI/Belgium List of Participants (in alphabetical order): BLAAUBOER, Dick - Eumetnet BRAININ, Evgeny - Israel Meteorological Service Monday, 12th of November CSEKITS, Christian - ZAMG/Austria Session I ˝Introduction˝: CUSACK, Evelyn - Met Éireann/Ireland DAVIDOFF, Oren - Israel Meteorological * Welcome Address Director of IMS Nir Stav Service Nir Stav tells us about the history of IMS and the DIEPEVEEN, Jos - KNMI/The Netherlands important role of Ben Gurion in establishing the HEWSON, Tim - ECMWF weather service, particularly for aviation forecasting. HOIKKANEN, Marjo - FMI/Finland Nowadays IMS is active in a wide range of sectors. JAMESON, Stephanie - UK Met Office/Great * Opening words (Christian, Jos) Britain LETESTU, Andre-Charles - MeteoSwiss/ * Welcome of the new WGCEF members (Jos and Switzerland Christian) KALIN, Lovro - DHMZ/Meteorological and * Agree agenda and review actions from last Hydrometeorological Service of Croatia meeting (Jos and Christian) 6 The European Forecaster Session II ˝Updates since the last – Higher resolution (32km from 80km, ocean 0.25 from 1, sea ice model) meeting : ˝ – More recent reference period for anoma- * Round table: participants introduce themselves lies, to help address non-stationarity (climate and give an update on new developments within change) issues. their NMSs (5 minutes each) • New Model cycle 45r1 went live in Jun 2018 Cristian Csekits/ZAMG – Improved physics, better rainfall near coasts in “warm rain” situations • ZAMG are participating in the ARISTOTLE II – Lightning flash density forecasts included Project which delivers multi-hazard information to the ERCC (Emergency Response Coordination – HRES now coupled to ocean, so SST changes Centre); Start: November 2018. according to overlying weather. • Migration work for the relocation of the next • INCA: forecast data from AROME (instead of ECMWF supercomputer in Bologna is gathering ALARO) from end of 2018 onwards pace… • New thunderstorm guidance bulletin for internal • New Web-based Forecast User Guide released users (maybe presentation for 2019). in May 2018 – unrestricted access. • Projected restructuring of one shift (more inter- • ENS and HRES Vertical Profiles are now avai- national weather forecasts or more activities on lable in ecCharts. social media; more details in 2019). • “Weather Cloud” initiative started. Evelyn Cusack (MET EIREANN) Robert Hausen (DWD) • 12 members Ensemble high-resolution (2.5km) has become operational. Model is 54 hour and en- • Issue of warnings for west Germany switched from sembles are 36 hours. Offenbach to the regional office in Essen. Regio- • We are hiring 8 meteorologists - interview panel nal expertise across the whole of Germany is now took place in July, but no one has arrived yet! under control/guidance of supervisor/lead forecas- ter in Offenbach. • We are setting up a Flood Forecasting Center. Hiring 6 hydromets (3 so far). • Fusion of aviation and general weather forecas- ting in Essen, looking to prove a similar concept • Monthly forecaster/NWP’ers meeting….very for Berlin and Munich. useful. Sometimes lively. Older forecasters resis- ting ensembles! (ECMWF course in February). • The forecasting headquarters in Offenbach will now focus more on international activities and is- Jos Diepeveen (KNMI) sue of user-orientated products (focus on severe weather events). • Major KNMI project: development of a new web- based Met. Work Station: Geoweb. Other Euro- • After a successful period of evaluation, ICON- pean NMS's are also interested. EPS went operational in early 2018. • KNMI received extra funding from the ministry Veronika Hladnik (EARS) this year to keep basic services on a proper level, • New web page www.vreme.si with hourly fore- with possibility for development to an Early War- cast which is nice for use for smart phones. ning System. However, budget-planning for 2019 is still difficult. • Internal project for new subjective products for special groups of users is in progress. • On the 8th of March, International Women's Day, we had a completely female operational shift. • Small group starting to produce audio and/or video recordings. Tim Hewson (ECMWF) Lovro Kalin (DHMZ) • New seasonal forecast system SEAS5 went live in Nov 2017 • Small group starting to produce audio and/or video The European Forecaster 7 recordings. fully employed, some still on appren- developed in FMI to ease the production of Signi- tice), age structure changed - generation shift. ficant Weather Charts together with SMHI in Swe- den. • Still problems with infrastructure (operational room, inadequate facilities) • We have started to use Slack as in-house chat and team message platform. Aviation unit is using – refurbishment needed, new building expected Slack to communicate (SWC, Sigmets) with other in 2022. Scandinavian and Baltic aviation units. • IBL VW visualisation is fully operational, whilst forecast production is currently in progress - ex- • Since last autumn, aviation forecasters have been pected fully in Spring 2019. participating in weather meetings in Helsinki Airport operations center, together with airport stakehol- – new products (tailored, automated end pro- ders, to help plan actions to mitigate the effects of ducts, tailored diagnostic/forecasting parame- high-impact snowfalls and thunderstorms. ters). • The FMI is participating in the ARISTOTLE (All • Warnings improvements (more elements, cold Risk Integrated System TOwards Trans-bounda- waves introduced this winter, demand for County ry hoListic Early-warning) Project which delivers based warnings, automation, impact based, multi-hazard information to the ERCC (Emergen- thresholds improvements...). cy Response Coordination Centre). As a backup • New web page meteo.hr leader of the weather hazard group after UKMO, we are also leading the group ten weeks per year. • Forecasters communicate via Slack, though still await the use of other social networks. • The FMI is leading the PECASUS (Pan-Euro- pean Consortium for Aviation Space weather User Mikko Laine (FMI) Services) consortium, which is aiming to provide information on space weather that has the po- • Regular, twice a month, verification meetings tential to affect communications, navigation and between meteorologists, model developers and health of passengers and crew. post-processing method developers. Also we have nominated one meteorologist to work as contact • We are starting to collect a database of impacts person between model developers and forecas- of severe weather events to further increase the ters. In addition some of our forecasters are more accuracy of impact based warnings. engaged with the post-processing method deve- lopment. In both cases above worktime is shared Andre Charles Letestu (Meteoswiss) between development and forecasting units. • A new law has been approved by Parliament, • We have integrated crowdsourcing app to our which applies from the 1st January 2019. One of weather app. We are collecting weather ob- the main aims of this is to strongly reduce the price servations from citizens (e.g. precipitation, ice of observed and forecast data. thickness, snow depth, hail, slippery pedestrian • A new project has been launched which is aimed weather). Meteorologists can monitor these ob- at developing a concept to communicate probabi- servations directly from our meteorological works- listic forecasts to the public. A number of products tation (SmartMet). now include probabilities, especially on the web- • Tailored products for our customers: weather site and in the App. chat, Webex briefings (virtual meeting) e.g. for ice • MeteoSwiss have published documents about breakers & pilots and electricity companies. climatic scenarios in Switzerland (CH2018) and • We have increased our activity in social media. their resulting probable effects on tourism, eco- We have reorganised our shifts to get more time nomy, agriculture, civil protection and welfare; for social media tasks: regular tweets in Twitter, events have been organized in various locations weather related videos in YouTube. We can also in Switzerland. Several products are currently pro- create weather videos directly from our worksta- duced manually, but it is planned to produce these tion. automatically using data4web. This is a forecast data base computed using model data, and input • The aviation weather unit has launched a tool from the forecaster. 8 The European Forecaster • A MeteoSwiss twitter channel will be launched ‒ Programme of voluntary redundancies. on the 1st March. There will be one for each lan- • What this means for forecasting – Making ope- guage. At least one tweet a day should be sent. rational work more efficient, developing tools to • Continuous snow measurement (every 10 mi- cope with future NWP, object/event approach, nutes) will soon