List of European Institutions/Projects collecting daily 24-hourly accumulated precipitation observation data

for the needs of the Numerical Weather Prediction

Consortium COSMO

COSMO = COnsortium for Small-scale MOdelling

Responsible person: Uli Damrath, NWP Verification, DWD

Membership of COSMO: the NWS of Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland and Switzerland.

On behalf of and for the needs of the Members of COSMO, the DWD collects the non-GTS daily 24-hour accumulated precipitation observations of

- Germany 3363 stations

- Italy: 418 stations

- Poland 308 stations

- Switzerland 445 stations

Data from these 4 countries are collected and stored by the DWD since November 2002.

DWD makes no quality control but reformat uniformly the data in ASCII code.

No analyses are made.

The data are freely available for the COSMO Members.

ECMWF

ECMWF = European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts

Responsible person: Horst Böttger, Head of the Meteorological Division, ECMWF

Spatial high resolution precipitation observations received at the ECMWF

ECMWF has asked his Members (Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Spain, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Austria, Portugal, Switzerland, Finland, Sweden, Turkey, United Kingdom) and the NWS of the countries which have a co-operation agreement with the Centre (Croatia, Czech Republic, Iceland, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Serbia and Montenegro) to deliver to him on a monthly basis the 24-hour accumulated observed precipitations of all their meteorological and climatological stations. The quality of these data has been controlled by the respective NWS Services. The Centre makes no quality control.

The Centre receives the monthly tables in delayed mode, sometimes with delays of several months. All the stations measuring precipitations are on the monthly tables: it is not necessary for the Centre - as example - to look for the SYNOP stations reporting precipitations in the GTS files.

The Centre receives about 17'000 daily accumulated precipitation observations per day.

With these data, the Centre produces operationally for each day a 24-h accumulated precipitation analysis on 3 different grids. The grids are:

- the reduced Gaussian grid of the T799 operational deterministic forecasts

- the reduced Gaussian grid of the T399 ensemble forecasts (EPS)

- a 0.5 x 0.5 degree lat/long grid.

These gridded files will be archived in MARS (ECMWF in-house archiving system) and will be available to ECMWF Members and co-operating States.

The Centre has bi-lateral contracts with each of the NWS delivering precipitation data and it is not allowed to give these data (observations from meteorological and climatological stations) to a third party, i.e. not even to another NWS delivering its precipitation data to the Centre.

for the needs of the Climatology

Global Precipitation Climatology Centre (GPCC)

Web site: http://www.dwd.de/en/FundE/Klima/KLIS/int/GPCC/GPCC.htm

Responsible person: Bruno Rudolf, DWD

In the frame of the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS), the DWD hosts the Global Precipitation Climatology Centre (GPCC) which provides several types of gridded analyses of the global monthly precipitations made from meteorological and climate observation networks.

This Centre has been set up and is organised to cover the needs of the global climatology.

ECA&D

ECA&D = European Climate Assessment & Dataset

Web site: http://eca.knmi.nl/

Responsible person: Aryan van Engelen, KNMI

The ECA&D Project is initiated by the European Climate Support Network (ECSN) which is a Programme of the European Meteorological Network (EUMETNET).

The objective of this Programme is to organise improved co-operation between its Members in the field of climate.

The EUMETNET Members are the European National Weather Services.

ECA&C collects meteorological observations from 257 stations disseminated through whole Europe, including Russia. This implies a very a large-scale, low resolution network. As an example, France is covered by 10 stations only. Automatic procedures place quality control flags to the observations received.

The observations are collected by the NWS of The Netherlands (KNMI at De Bilt) which produces very different products.

EU Project ENSEMBLES

Web site: http://www.ensembles-eu.org/

Responsible person: Albert Klein Tank, ENSEMBLES RT 5, KNMI

ENSEMBLES is a very large EU project supported by the European Commission's 6th Framework Programme as a 5 year Integrated Project from 2004-2009.

The main aim of the Project is to develop an ensemble prediction system (EPS) for climate change based on the principal state-of-the-art, high resolution, global and regional Earth System models developed in Europe, validated against quality controlled, high resolution daily gridded datasets for Europe.

These daily gridded datasets for Europe will include 24-hourly accumulated total precipitation.

To build these gridded analyses - including daily precipitation amounts - an observation data base is needed.

This data base will be the ECA&D data base which will be largely extended by additional data series. Among others, data of the EU FP5 projects STARDEX and EMULATE will be included. These supplementary data will not be released publicly.

ENSEMBLES data base aims at a mean spatial resolution of one station every 50 km.

Gridding methods have still to be developed. ENSEMBLES hopes to produce the first daily analyses on a 25 km grid by the end of 2007.

Since March 2005 about 1500 stations collected (current station density: 1 station per 84 * 84 km), but: heterogeneous station density over Europe

EUROGRID show-case

Responsible person:

Walter Kirchhofer, EUMETNET ECSN Programme Manager, MeteoSwiss

The ECSN Programme has submitted to the EUMETNET Coordinating Officer a proposal for a "EUROGRID show-case" Project. This Project will be considered for acceptation by the EUMETNET Council at its next meeting (11-12 October 2005, Helsinki).

The idea of the Project is to develop for the different needs of the operational and research climatology in Europe the infrastructure for the development and the daily production of a comprehensive set of gridded analyses covering whole Europe at very high spatial resolution for the usual meteorological parameters (pressure, temperature, etc), including the 24-hourly accumulated precipitations.

As it is a complex and laborious endeavour, the initiators of the project have decided to start with a show-case (or prototype) that will help to asses the effort needed and the cost for the realization of the full-scale project.

As at the time of writing an official documentation is not yet available. The information communicated orally by the ECSN Programme Manager is acknowledged.