Global Characteristics of Medium-Scale Tropopausal Waves Observed in ECMWF Operational Data

Basin-scale water-balance estimates of terrestrial water storage variations from ECMWF operational forecast analysis

[1] In recent publications, a new basin-scale dataset of monthly variations in terrestrial water storage (BSWB) was derived for the ERA40 time period (1958–2002) using an atmospheric-terrestrial water-balance approach (Seneviratne et al., 2004; Hirschi et al., 2006). Here, we test the feasibility of using ECMWF operational forecast analyses – available for the recent time period in near real ti...

Global survey of concentric gravity waves in AIRSimages and ECMWF analysis

Concentric gravity waves (CGWs) are atmospheric phenomena with ring-shape perturbations originating in the troposphere. They can propagate up to the ionosphere and thermosphere and dynamically couple the lower and upper atmosphere. In this study we developed a novel ring detection algorithm to extract CGWs from the Atmosphere Infrared Sounder (AIRS) radiance data and the European Center for Med...

The role of ARGO temperature and salinity data in the ECMWF operational ocean analysis system

A new operational ocean analysis system (system 3 or S3) has been implemented at ECMWF. It consists of two analysis streams: (i) a historical reanalysis from 01/01/1959 which is continuosly maintained up to 11 days behind real time and is used to initialize seasonal forecasts, and (ii) an early delivery ocean analysis, produced daily in real time, used to initialize the monthly forecasts. The S...

Characteristics of African Easterly Waves Depicted by ECMWF Reanalyses for 1991-2000

The seasonal cycle of Kelvin waves in the ECMWF analyses

Atmospheric dynamics in the tropical regions is dominated by unbalanced motions in response to convective processes, found to vary on many temporal scales from diurnal to inter-seasonal and inter-annual scales. The gravest wave excited by convection is the Kelvin wave and it is characteristics by eastward and upward propagation away from its convective source. As it propagates vertically, a pac...