iOBS

iOBS

iOBS - Improved Observation Usage in Numerical Weather Prediction

Background

United Weather Centres (UWC) is a collaboration between the meteorological institutes of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia on running their forecast weather models. Until 2027, the effort is split into two parts: UWC East (Finland, Norway, Sweden, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia), who will expand the already operational cooperation between Norway, Finland and Sweden known as MetCoOp, and UWC West (Denmark, Iceland, Netherlands and Ireland), who are forming a new partnership. Both will be effective from 2022, and merged by 2027.

The iOBS project

This a 10M NOK (50% in-kind), two-year project to help expand the MetCoOp cooperation (UWC East). The iOBS initiative will accommodate an increasing amount and diversity of observation data used as input into the weather models, and provide a system of data pooling and merging, harmonised across the participating national meteorological institutes.

The project will improve, develop and implement timely quality control (QC) algorithms for a massive amount of private observations of surface pressure, using an existing data source covering the Nordic countries. Other emerging observation types will also be explored within the limits of the project. If successful, this will to our knowledge be the first time private pressure observations are assimilated in an operational numerical weather prediction system.