Sedona, AZ, United States, 22 to 25 May 2012
The WMO and THORPEX co-sponsored fifth Workshop on the Impact of Various Observing Systems on Numerical Weather Prediction will be organised by the Expert Team on the Evolution of the Global Observing System in Sedona, Arizona, United States, from 22 to 25 May 2012. Participants are expected to come from all the major NWP centres which are active in the area of impact studies. The workshop will be conducted in English. As for the first four workshops it is planned to produce a workshop report to be published as a WMO Technical Report that will include the papers submitted by the participants.
The previous four workshops in this series took place in Geneva (April 1997), Toulouse (March 2000), Alpbach (March 2004) and Geneva (May 2008). Results from Observing System Experiments (OSEs), both with global and regional aspects were presented and conclusions were drawn concerning the contributions of the various components of the observing system to the large scale forecast skill at short and medium range (Workshop Proceedings were published as WMO World Weather Watch Technical Reports TD No. 868, 1034, 1228 and 1450).
Since then, some significant changes and developments have affected the global observing system and more efforts have been devoted to meso-scale observing and assimilation systems. There has also been a trend toward using techniques other than OSEs to document data impact, such as adjoint-based sensitivity to observations or ensemble-based sensitivity. Field experiments have been carried out, in particular through the THORPEX project, and the use of targeted data has been assessed.
You may wish to contribute to the workshop on any of these general topics, or address one or several of the specific studies and science questions listed in the attachment. Those who are interested in contributing to this workshop are asked to submit a short abstract and request an invitation from the organisers by e-mail as detailed below.
At the Fifth workshop, the results will be reviewed in plenary discussion sessions and a consensus view will be formed. Conclusions to help guide the design of an optimised Global Observing System for NWP will be drawn.
The workshop will be organised in the following sessions:
- Session 1: Global forecast impact studies
- Session 2: Regional forecast impact studies
- Session 3: Specific scientific areas (including network design)
- Session 4: Workshop discussions and conclusions.
The Organizing Committee, chaired by Erik Andersson (ECMWF), comprises Carla Cardinali (ECMWF), John Eyre (Met Office, UK), Ron Gelaro (NOAA/GMAO, the US), Miroslav Ondráš (WMO), Florence Rabier (Meteo-France), Lars Peter Riishøjgaard (NOAA/JCSDA, the US) and Yoshiaki Sato (JMA, Japan).
The local organizing committee is chaired by Lars Peter Riishøjgaard (NOAA/JCSDA, the US). Information on local arrangements (the venue, access, local transportation, accommodation, climate, etc.) will be posted on:
www.wmo.int/pages/prog/www/BAS/CBS-meetings.html in due time. The local organisers will coordinate hotel arrangements for the attendees.