European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts

Group on Earth Observations – GEO Week 2023

Statement of ECMWF

ECMWF is looking forward to participating in the GEO Week 2023 in Cape Town. Via the European Union Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S, https://climate.copernicus.eu/), the Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS, https://atmosphere.copernicus.eu/), and through the flood and fire forecasting systems run on behalf of the Emergency Management Service (CEMS, https://emergency.copernicus.eu/), ECMWF enables and supports many activities and developments in the GEO community.

C3S provides free and open data products about the past, current and future climate. The popular global re-analysis ERA5 dataset, besides being used extensively in monthly climate bulletins and the annual European State of the Climate and many other applications, it has now also become the dataset of choice to train AI/ML weather prediction models, which are showing great potential and could unlock many downstream applications for the GEO community.

CAMS provides accurate analyses and forecasts detailing the composition of the atmosphere as well as linked emissions, with information including air pollutants, stratospheric ozone, aerosols and dust as well as wildfires at European and global scales, climate forcing and greenhouse gases, anthropogenic CO2 and CH4 emissions.

On behalf of CEMS, ECMWF runs the European Forest Fire (EFFIS) and Global Wildfires Information Systems (GWIS) to provide operational fire danger forecasts and the Global Flood Awareness System (GloFAS) aiming to increase preparedness against hydrological extremes and help emergency responses efforts across the world.

Recognizing the need to provide a single and consistent view of the variety of Copernicus products and services available to user communities in different sectors, the European Union has entrusted ECMWF to develop and maintain two thematic hubs, on health and energy. We hope that they will become a trusted source of data and information for the various GEO initiatives active in these two sectors and that they will stimulate synergies in the community.

As part of the European Union Destination Earth initiative and in collaboration with its Member States, ECMWF is developing a climate change adaptation digital twin and a weather-induced and geophysical extremes digital twin, as well as the common system approach underlying these and other digital twins.

An important aspect of the Copernicus initiative is that the data produced are all free and open. ECMWF is moving towards an open data policy also for its weather forecasting products and in 2024 will increase significantly the offering, with a large dataset provided in real-time at the same resolution as the ERA5 dataset and the resolution adopted by the best known ML models.

The participation in GEO allows ECMWF to keep a close relationship with the environmental data user community and we are looking forward to many more years of fruitful collaboration.