10° COSMO GENERAL MEETING

Plans and State of Art at USAM/CNMCA

Massimo Ferri

Strategy at USAM/CNMCAVision:Under the pressure of reduction in human and financial resources to preserve the operational capability of the National Meteorological Service, maintaining it at the state of the art.Continue to serve as national reference in the international scenario and contribute to the consolidation of the “European Meteorological Infrastructure” To promote better integration with the Regional Met. Services and enhance relationship with Academy and Industry in Italy.

Plans:•Renewal of the observational network (both ground and upper air segments) – a 3 years programme has been approved with a first allocation of 10 M€.•Renewal of the computing infrastructure dedicated to the handling of meteorological data in order to cope with (interoperability) requirements posed by WIS, INSPIRE, Military Applications – the programme is under discussion.•Renewal of the computing infrastructure dedicated to the web services – technical requirements ready; allocation of 700 k€ available; ITT to be issued in the last quarter 2008.•To run operationally the Hydrology Satellite Application Facility at CNMCA (Precipitation products) – Product operation readiness is under certification by EUMETSAT; end of process expected by mid 2009.

Achievements at USAM/CNMCA in the last COSMO year

• new computing infrastructure dedicated to numerical application – the contract was signed , the system , selected using LM-RAPS 4.0 as benchmark, is an HP BL3000 128 nodes bi-processor quadcore (Harpertown) and will be installed in the first quarter 2009 after completion of site preparation.

• A prototype of the software of the Standard Weather Station, based on the concept of sensors plug-in and including the library of measurement algorithms, was developed and tested.

•The development phase of H-SAF precipitation products was completed and the operational procedures assuring the fulfilment of the requirements in terms of availability and dissemination were built and routinely run.

•COSMO-Model exploitation:•RTTOV9.1 interface was developed•A wave model, forced by COSMO-ME, was developed for the Mediterranean at resolution of 3’x3’ and is in operation since mid-summer 2008•An interactive platform based on COSMO-ME output and AWI post processing was developed and used by forecaster on duty to produce input to multimedia forecasts distributed (as XML files) to the national TV broadcaster.

Status of the NWP System at USAM/CNMCA

The NWP suite is run as “Time critical application for Member States” at ECMWF. It is organized as follows:

1.Data assimilation: 3D-Var PSAS FGAT using HRM as prognostic component and BCs from IFS. Domain Euro-Atlantic. Resolution 14 Km. 40 vertical levels. Time step 3 hours.

2.COSMO-ME: COSMO 4.3. ICs interpolated from data assimilation and BCs from IFS. Domain: Mediterranean. Resolution 7 km , 40 vertical levels. Time range 72 hours. Only 00 run.

3.COSMO-IT: COSMO 4.3. ICs 6 hours nudging. Domain Italy. Resolution 2.8 Km, 50 vertical levels . Time range 36 hours. Only 00 run.

4.Post Processing (only on COSMO-ME output):1. Automatic Weather Interpretation produces ww code + cloud type2. Pseudo Satellite Imagery for MSG channel IR 10.8

Current and Future developments of the NWP System at USAM/CNMCA

A new data assimilation system based on LETKF is in an advanced phase of development. The new scheme presents numerous advantages: no dependency on any statistically predefined structure of the background error (i.e., fully flow-dependent); dependency on the prognostic component is only trough forward observational operator (i.e., simpler use of radiances/precipitation obs.); the system is optimally suitable to produce the set of ICs for a short range ensemble forecast system. The preliminary results are very positive and the expectation is for a system with at least comparable skill with a 4D-Var data assimilation.

The NWP suite will be progressively moved to the new computer system, starting with the new data assimilation component.

A Post Processing module will be developed/adapted in order to be applied on the COSMO-IT output.

Versus Software Package will be the platform adopted for the verification activities at CNMCA.

Contributions to COSMO

2008: Coordination of WG5 and Leadership PP Versus; Contribution in PP Versus and PP RK.

2009: Coordination of WG5 and Leadership PP Versus 2; contributions in PP Versus 2,PP CODICO, PP UTCS and PP COLOBLOC.