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The French academic sector in the field of environment sciences, including meteorology and climate, is organized through a cooperation among several national organizations and universities. National organizations and universities operating in the field of environmental sciences belong to a federation called AllEnvi, initiated in 2010. Météo-France, the French national eather service, is a founding member of AllEnvi, among 11 other organizations such as CNRS, BRGM, CEA, Ifremer, IRD, INRAE etc. 15 further associate members contribute to AllEnvi activities. AllEnvi brings together their top executives through regular meetings, and discusses and implements joint strategies through topical groups involving relevant experts. This enables regular discussions between key players in the field of environmental sciences at the national scale. One of the mandates of AllEnvi is to develop research agenda covering its various domains, and provide guidance for strategic priorities to its members and the national research funding agency ANR.

In the field of meteorology and climate, a key long lasting collaboration has developed between Météo-France and CNRS, the national research council. In particular, Météo-France and CNRS jointly run several research entities, in particular the Centre National de Recherches Météorologiques (CNRM) based in Toulouse, Grenoble and Lannion and the Laboratoire de l’Atmosphère et des Cyclones (LACy) on Réunion Island also affiliated with Université de la Réunion. These laboratories bring together scientific, technical and administrative staff from these organizations around common goals and projects. Météo-France, CNRS and CNES, the national space agency, operate research aircrafts through the SAFIRE fleet. Other key long-lasting collaborations include CERFACS and Mercator Ocean International. 

CNRS, Météo-France and other research organizations, provide funding to national programmes in the field of meteorology and climate under a common scientific committee. Scientists from virtually any laboratory can apply for seed funding from these programmes, which also contribute to developing and maintain strong ties among the scientific community, including on emerging topics.  

This manifold collaboration at the national level is also reflected at the European level, through research infrastructures, European partnerships (including ECMWF and the consortium for numerical weather prediction ACCORD), and contributions to research and innovations calls from the Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe programmes.

These daily interactions between Météo-France and its academic partners, implemented in particular through its research laboratories CNRM and LACy, are mutually beneficial to improving weather forecasting and climate modelling tools and their operational uses for meteorological and climate services, as well as using these tools for addressing new or persistent scientific challenges. This close cooperation also contributes to maintaining research and development activities at Météo-France as close as possible to the highest scientific standards. This contribution will summarize the implementation research cooperation in particular between Météo-France and the academic sector, its successes, challenges, lessons learnt and perspectives.

How to cite: Morin, S.: Collaboration in meteorology and climate sciences between academic and operational stakeholders in France, EMS Annual Meeting 2022, Bonn, Germany, 5–9 Sep 2022, EMS2022-281, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2022-281, 2022.

Fundamental research addressing the challenges of weather forecasts and climate monitoring is required in order to steadily improve the quality of meteorological and climatological services. However, the potential of transferring results from this research into operations increases significantly if carried out in collaboration with national meteorological and hydrometeorological services (NMHS). Out of this motivation and experience, the German “Hans-Ertel-Centre for Weather Research” (HErZ) has been established in 2011 as a virtual competence centre.

HErZ develops and organizes a lasting national consortium along common objectives between the German Meteorological Service (DWD), German universities and scientific institutes to accelerate innovation in DWD’s weather, climate and environmental services. HErZ carries out excellent research, strengthens university education and promotes early career scientists, ensures personnel and strategical development, and facilitates the establishment and success of new cooperation, also outside of Germany. Moreover, HErZ grants access to DWD’s infrastructure, including (global) observation data and prediction models. With the strong support of the German Federal Ministry of Digital and Transport, HErZ was able to overcome the difficulties within initiating a cooperation between partners of different institutional communities and established an unprecedented sustainable and national transdisciplinary network.

The current research and objectives of HErZ cover the whole value chain expected from this year’s EMS Annual Meeting’s additional focus on “Connecting Communities”: Bringing together fundamental and applied research, observations with prediction models, research institutions with NHMS, and developers with end-users. This intertwined and progressive structure in science and communication ultimately results in acquiring value for society as a whole.

Establishing and managing HErZ and its scientific, strategic and structural goals is challenging. The complex tasks of achieving excellence in science and long-term success require a suitable balance between demands and needs of all institutions involved as well as an independent and strong governance by national and international high-level experts.

In the future, HErZ must respond to new societal challenges in a targeted but flexible manner with new topics and competences, national and international partners, and a strengthened dialog with stakeholders and users.

With this contribution, we would like to share with the audience

• the establishment, structure and peculiarities of HErZ,
• the lessons learnt from a transdisciplinary consortium connecting NHMS, universities and research institutes, and
• our visions towards future seamless science and services.

How to cite: Jones, S., Rotach, M. W., Simmer, C., Adrian, G., Ahlgrimm, M., Albert, S.-A., Craig, G., Deneke, H., Ditas, J., Fiedler, S., Göber, M., Hohenegger, C., Janjic-Pfander, T., Keller, J., Keller, J., Klocke, D., Löhnert, U., Masbou, M., Magro, F.-A., Ohlwein, C., Pardowitz, T., Riß, N., Rust, H. W., Sakradzija, M., Scheck, L., Schlemmer, L., Schmidli, J., Schomburg, A., Seifert, A., Trömel, S., Ulbrich, T., Vormann, A., Wahl, S., Wapler, K., Weißmann, M., Weingärtner, C., and Wirth, V.: The German “Hans-Ertel-Centre for Weather Research” (HErZ), EMS Annual Meeting 2022, Bonn, Germany, 5–9 Sep 2022, EMS2022-647, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2022-647, 2022.

Italy and Germany are establishing a new bilateral cooperation in meteorology, climatology and related disciplines that will create a hub of excellence for cutting edge research and translate the findings into improving operational services and university education. The joint research and education network IDEA-S4S will harness expertise of universities, research institutes and operational services in both countries and foster scientific exchange and collaboration to improve weather, climate and environmental services.

Within the new programme, the core areas of scientific expertise of both countries will be systematically brought together, activities will be streamlined and extended beyond basic research collaboration to form a holistic IDEA-S4S network of weather and climate science and education, extending from qualification of graduates to support for early career researchers to networking of senior scientists. The programme will cooperate with WMO and the European Meteorological Infrastructure (ECMWF, EUMETSAT, EUMETNET) and strengthen the scientific environment for the ECMWF sites in Bonn and Bologna. A Joint Steering Committee will oversee the cooperation and guide the overall scientific and strategic direction of the programme.

Through four-year funding periods, the network aims to make substantial progress in seamless high-resolution probabilistic Earth system prediction, employing state-of-the-art observing systems and Earth system models. This requires improved understanding and application of coupled processes between the components of the Earth system (including atmosphere-ocean-ice-land-vegetation-rivers) as well as between the impacts of human activities and the Earth system. Such complex weather and climate prediction systems place high demands on high-performance computing infrastructure, generate extremely large data volumes and need to integrate observations seamlessly into the models.

In this contribution, we will present the concept and roadmap of the IDEA-S4S network, which will focus on improving seamless weather and climate forecasts, in particular for high impact events such as floods and droughts. Both countries have experienced devastating impacts of such extreme events with unusual rainfall intensities, some of which even lead to the destruction of entire regions. Better understanding the complex structure and the numerous feedback processes in such events will improve the prediction of future events in support of a better prepared and resilient society.

How to cite: Navarra, A., Jones, S., Bassini, S., Cacciamani, C., Crewell, S., Ditas, J., Facchini, M. C., Gualdi, S., Hinkelmann, R., Jung, T., Kiendler-Scharr, A., Kusche, J., Masbou, M., Seuffert, G., and Volosciuk, C.: The new Italia – Deutschland science-4-services network in weather and climate (IDEA-S4S), EMS Annual Meeting 2022, Bonn, Germany, 5–9 Sep 2022, EMS2022-554, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2022-554, 2022.

The Global-to-Regional ICON (GLORI) Digital Twin is a project made possible by the tri-lateral cooperation between Germany, Italy and Switzerland. The project is fostered by the ICON cooperation and by the long-lasting collaboration in the COSMO Consortium and in the CLM Community. The partnership includes national weather and climate services as well as research institutes, which bring together a broad and transdisciplinary expertise. Project partners are the Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD), the Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ) and the Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT) in Germany, the Centro euro-Mediterraneo sui Cambiamenti Climatici (CMCC), the Agenzia per la meteorologia e climatologia ItaliaMeteo (IM), the HydroMeteoClimate Service of Arpae Emilia-Romagna (Arpae-SIMC) and the Servizio meteorologico dell'Aeronautica Militare (MeteoAM) in Italy and the Swiss Federal Office for Meteorology and Climatology (MeteoSwiss) in Switzerland. GLORI is a configurable on-demand global-to-regional short-range high resolution digital twin based on the prediction capability of ICON. The twin is fit to run on heterogeneous GPU-CPU architecture at high resolution. It provides short-range global storm-resolving km-scale (~3 km horizontal) predictions using hybrid variational ensemble data assimilation. GLORI offers on-demand high resolution (~ 500m -1 km horizontal) predictions for the selected regions, like GLORI-Alps, the twin on the Alpine region. It includes uncertainty estimation through ensemble forecast for global and regional. Model parametrisations are developed to take into account higher-resolution and the complexity of the land-surface interface. It is possible to carry out on-demand predictions of selected atmospheric composition elements such as mineral dust for energy applications and pollen for health applications. The digital twin also includes interfaces to application layers in the hydrological area. The skill of the twin in forecasting precipitation at high-resolution will be also demonstrated on catchments by using a hydrological model as user-oriented verification tool.

How to cite: Marsigli, C. and Potthast, R. and the the GLORI Team: The Global-to-Regional ICON Digital Twin, EMS Annual Meeting 2022, Bonn, Germany, 5–9 Sep 2022, EMS2022-690, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2022-690, 2022.

As of  2018 the atmospheric research community in the Netherlands, including universities, agencies and institutes, joined forces in the Ruisdael Consortium, named after the 17th century painter who depicted the skies over Holland with a realistic interplay of light, clouds, and the land surface. The consortium centres its activities around the combined use of experimental facilities and model development, aiming at better forecasts of the weather and air quality, as well as getting deeper insights into climate processes. While the driving force behind the consortium results from the urge to advance science, the societal spin-off is hard to neglect. The observational data as well as the high resolution models increasingly find their use in industrial applications such as the generation of sustainable energy, or the evaluation of air quality in urban areas. The Ruisdael Consortium acts as an agenda setting body in the atmospheric sciences, and contributes to the long term strategy of science in the Netherlands, and with its combination of academia, applied institutes and agencies it embodies a direct link between education, research, application and public outreach.

Selected examples of the Ruisdael activities are

• Coordinated actions in Amsterdam to study the urban climate for improving climate adaptation strategies in cities,
• Studies in Rotterdam of the interplay between climate change and potentially enhanced virus outbreaks,
• Fine weather forecasts for the wind and solar energy production.

With the Ruisdael stations currently confined to land, plans are being developed to install additional station on the North Sea, making use of the proliferation of wind farms in a co-creative setting of the scientific and industrial communities.

How to cite: Russchenberg, H., Apituley, A., and Holzinger, R.: The Ruisdael Observatory: advancing atmospheric science in the Netherlands, EMS Annual Meeting 2022, Bonn, Germany, 5–9 Sep 2022, EMS2022-200, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2022-200, 2022.

The Center for Climate Systems Modeling (C2SM) is one of ETH’s extradepartmental centres and a joint venture between ETH Zurich, MeteoSwiss, Empa, and WSL. The centre's mission is to provide a technical and scientific platform and a network for its partner institutions to support the development and application of complex models of the weather and climate system. It also supports the analysis and visualisation of climate data, to enable and facilitate collaborations within C2SM’s community and beyond, to exploit synergies among the partner institutions, and to engage in a dialogue with the general public and other stakeholders about climate-​relevant issues. C2SM also acts as the primary entry and interaction point for ETH, for national and international institutions, and for society at large on issues related to climate and climate change. C2SM currently focuses on four areas: 1) Working closely together with the Swiss National Supercomputer Centre (CSCS) and MeteoSwiss, as well as the international partners Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD) and Max-Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI), it develops and applies the next generation modelling paradigms in weather and climate. Specifically, in the six-year open ETH project EXCLAIM, C2SM together with its partners is developing an exascale computing and data platform for weather and climate modelling based on the weather forecast and climate model ICON that will be capable of simulating the regional to global ocean-sea-ice-atmosphere-land system on the kilometre scale globally. 2) C2SM works together with the community to maintain and further develop the atmospheric models and their extensions used in the community focusing on technical improvements and adaptations for high-performance computing. 3) Further, C2SM strongly engages in the development of the next generation Swiss climate scenarios in tight collaboration with the National Centre for Climate Services (NCCS) and MeteoSwiss. 4) C2SM also works together with experts in the areas of impact and risk modelling to foster the seamless integration of climate impact sciences into weather and climate models. Last, but no least, C2SM engages in the area of education and outreach by organising the Swiss Climate Summer School at two-yearly intervals and its annual outreach event ETH-Klimarunde, at which the public is informed about current topics of climate change. To support the research at C2SM and to provide these services, C2SM operates with a core budget of about 870 kCHF per year. This supports an executive director, 4.5 full time scientific programmers, and a small communication and event team that together form the C2SM core team.

How to cite: Schnadt Poberaj, C., Knutti, R., Brunner, D., Croci-Maspoli, M., Gruber, N., Plattner, G.-K., Seneviratne, S., and Stocker, B.: The ETH-Center for Climate Systems Modeling C2SM – enabling atmospheric science at the Zurich hub, EMS Annual Meeting 2022, Bonn, Germany, 5–9 Sep 2022, EMS2022-557, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2022-557, 2022.

As our ability to better understand and predict future weather and climate develops, so too do the expectations of our customers and stakeholders. The Met Office’s Research and Innovation Strategy 2020-2030 (R&I strategy) has identified a number of Research and Innovation themes to help with these evolving demands, and is structured into three core activities: pioneering research, foundational capability and science to services. The Met Office doesn’t have all the skills or resources needed to deliver the R&I strategy, so together with research organisations across the UK, Science Partnerships are needed to undertake joint research aimed at delivering the strategy.

These Science Partnerships aren’t new. A close collaboration with the University of Reading started in the 1980s, and in the late 2000s, a Joint Weather and Climate Research Programme had been established with the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Centres, shortly followed by the growth of the Met Office Academic Partnership, which now includes the Universities of Reading, Exeter, Leeds, Oxford, Bristol and University College London.

However, as the customer and stakeholder demands and the R&I strategy change, the Partnerships need to evolve. The R&I strategy can be considered a blueprint needed to meet this challenge, and now includes themes such as fusing simulation with data sciences; technology architecture and innovation; and hazard to decision making, all of which involve disciplines outside the scope of traditional weather and climate services.

Indeed, the last 2 years has seen a new Joint Centre for Excellence in Environmental Intelligence established with the University of Exeter to help fill gaps around data science. The Met Office is currently in discussion with NERC Centres around a new UK National Climate Science Partnership, to co-ordinate the national capability in climate science needed to inform climate solutions across society, to help build resilience and adapt to the challenges of the coming decades.

This contribution to the session will provide further detail of the Met Office’s R&I strategy, an overview of the Met Office UK Science Partnerships, the practicalities of developing successful Science Partnerships, and lessons learned. In depth examples can provided where research has translated into operations, such as the GungHo dynamical core developed with our Academic Partners, NERC and the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) as part of the Met Office’s Next Generation Modelling Systems, and how the UK Earth System Modelling project (jointly funded with NERC) contributed to the 6^th Climate Model Intercomparison Project, CMIP6.

How to cite: Pankiewicz, G. and Payne, V.: Delivering the Met Office Research & Innovation Strategy through UK Science Partnerships, EMS Annual Meeting 2022, Bonn, Germany, 5–9 Sep 2022, EMS2022-663, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2022-663, 2022.