Please join the Joint Center for Satellite Data Assimilation (JCSDA) this Thursday, June 27 at 2:00 PM in UCAR’s FL2-1022 for a seminar by Kristian Mogensen from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (Shinfield Park, Reading, UK). 

Click here to access a recording of this event.

Click here to view the presentation slides.

Title: Why we need an ocean model to do numerical weather prediction? 

Since the introduction of coupling into the high-resolution deterministic model (HRES) in June 2018, all ECMWF issued forecasts are based on a coupled atmosphere-wave-ocean-sea-ice model. Before June 2018, all ensemble systems from medium-range over monthly to seasonal forecasting were already using a coupled model. Coupling to the ocean for the medium-range ensemble were introduced in 2013 and upgraded to include an interactive sea-ice model in 2014. 

The coupled model at ECMWF currently uses the same ocean and sea-ice model configuration over all time ranges with different atmospheric resolution for different forecast ranges. The importance of having an interactive ocean at sub-seasonal to seasonal time scales are well established, so in the presentation, Kristian will show examples where having an interactive ocean model is important for the atmospheric predictions at medium-range time scales and discuss which atmospheric scores improve with ocean coupling.