Waves to Weather

Description of the project

Since 2015 DFG funds the Collaborative Research Center 165 “Waves to Weather” (W2W). Lead institution is the Ludwig-Maximilians University (LMU) in Munich. KIT and the Johannes Gutenberg University (JGU) in Mainz are the two most important partners. Other participants are the Technical University Munich (TUM), the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and the Universities of Heidelberg and Hamburg.

The consortium addresses the great challenge of identifying the limits of predictability and of producing the best forecasts that are physically possible. In particular, W2W investigates some of the most important causes of uncertainties in weather prediction:

  • the quick upscale growth of forecast errors from insufficiently resolved or represented processes like convection or boundary layer mixing, which modify synoptic-scale waves
  • our limited understanding of processes in clouds, and
  • the influence of local factors on weather that influence the predictability associated with larger-scale wave disturbances.

W2W addresses these three areas in a concerted effort involving contributions from the disciplines of atmospheric dynamics, cloud physics, statistics, inverse methods and visualization. W2W will use, and further develop a broad range of tools, including numerical models with detailed treatment of cloud processes and aerosols, ensemble forecasts with sophisticated statistical postprocessing and new interactive visualization methods to describe and identify uncertainty.

Show contribution of WG Knippertz
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