Recent Advances in Numerical Weather Prediction

Abstract

In recent years several application areas, which include reducing loss of life due to severe weather events, agriculture, water resource management, energy, public health; tourism and sports and transportation have posed a challenge to the meteorological community in India. The expectations from the user sectors shall increase along with increased awareness in coming years. Numerical weather prediction (NWP) models now include many complex physical processes and advanced data assimilation schemes. With the availability to high performance computing (HPC) the NWP models now feature very high horizontal and vertical resolutions. The National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF) has been a lead centre in India for all weather and climate model related research and operations. NCMRWF currently carries out developmental work on three modelling systems, namely, NCMRWF Global Forecast System (NGFS), NCMRWF Global Ensemble Forecast System (NGEFS) and NCMRWF Unified Model (NCUM). Although the recent advances have reflected in the improved forecast skill in the NWP models, accurate prediction of extreme events is still a challenge. The recent developmental activities at NCMRWF on the next generation weather and climate modelling systems are highlighted in the paper.