Waves to Weather (W2W)

Description

This special collection comprises the results of the Collaborative Research Center “Waves to Weather” (W2W), which is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation). The main topic of W2W is predictability and prediction of weather. The current scientific themes of W2W are "Upscale error growth", "Cloud-scale uncertainties", and "Predictability of local weather". It includes theoretical studies, numerical modeling, and process studies based in part on cutting edge statistical methods and visualization tools, NWP models and data collected during the field campaign NAWDEX.

The aim of W2W is to identify the limits of predictability of weather and to produce the best forecasts that are physically possible. The focus of W2W is on the most important causes of remaining uncertainties in weather prediction, which include:
- 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 currently consist of eighteen individual scientific projects located in Germany (Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, German Aerospace Center (DLR) Oberpfaffenhofen, and University of Heidelberg). Read More…

Collection organizers:
Audine Laurian and George C. Craig, Meteorological Institute, Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich, Germany