ECMWF has improved their snow model by using observations from Sodankylä Supersite. Due to overly simplified snow model, the weather forecasts in Northern Europe in particular have been inaccurate. The model hasn’t allowed sufficient variation between day and night time temperatures. The new multilevel snow model will bring improvements to ECMWF forecasts by using Sodankylä meteorological measurements and manual snow density and temperature observations. The new model is currently run in test mode, but will be assimilated as a part of the operational ECMWF weather forecasting model after the next update.
This is a great example of the excellent work done by FMI-SPACE in collecting rich meteorological data at Sodankylä, a snow covered boreal site in Finnish Lapland (e.g. Essery et al. (2016) and Leppänen et al., (2016)) and highlight their use at ECMWF.
Read more about the topic in ECMWF’s Science blog: Towards improved forecasts in Northern Europe with a new snow model
More Information:
Research scientist, Sodankylä Research Infrastructure Principal Investigator Anna Kontu, anna.kontu@fmi.fi
Research scientist, Leena Leppänen, leena.leppanen@fmi.fi
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