- European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, Forecast Department, United Kingdom of Great Britain – England, Scotland, Wales (milana.vuckovic@ecmwf.int)
ECMWF has been providing resources on its operational high-performance computing (HPC) and cloud facilities (European Weather Cloud) to researchers and institutions through the Special Projects framework. This framework has been established almost 50 years ago as part of the creation of ECMWF. ECMWF's HPC facility is specifically designed to support both operational time-critical production of global weather forecasts and typical research workflows, therefore through Special Projects, researchers can get access not only to a top high-performance computing and cloud facility and one of the largest meteorological archives in the world, but also full user support.
Special Projects are defined as experiments or investigations of a scientific or technical nature, undertaken by one or more ECMWF Member States, likely to be of interest to general scientific community. The main aim of this initiative is to facilitate collaboration, enabling the development of innovative methodologies and tools for numerical weather prediction, climate and environmental modelling, and other disciplines within Earth System Sciences. All Special Project applications undergo a review process by ECMWF and its Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC), as well as ECMWF Member State's meteorological services and are ranked primarily by their scientific quality.
This poster will describe the Special Projects framework and showcase three recent Special Projects that illustrate collaborative nature of the initiative using ECMWF's HPC and European Weather Cloud facilities, including validating ICON model on ECMWF systems, the development of next-generation European Earth System Model (EC-EARTH4) and mapping the yet uncharted continuum of cyclone dynamics for the Euro Atlantic domain.
Through these examples, the poster will demonstrate how ECMWF Special Projects foster international collaboration, resource sharing, and innovation, enabling advancement in Earth System Science.
How to cite: Vuckovic, M. and Hemingway, B.: Advancing Earth System Science through collaboration: An overview of ECMWF Special Projects, EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-18336, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-18336, 2025.
