10th edition of the ESSL Testbed is upon us and will be held in four weeks: 14–18 June, 21–25 June, 5–9 July and 12–16 July. The second and third weeks are for invited experts, or participants who have already been to the Testbed before or other courses. Like last year, the Testbed will be held online. 44 participants have registered, 12 people for the regular and 10 for the expert weeks.
Compared to 2020, there are a few new aspects. First, we have improved our Weather Data Displayer, which has a new, darker layout, and now allows a smoother switching between different regions. Moreover, a transparency option for data layers has been added. There is also more NWP data in the displayer compared to last year, including ensemble output from ICON-D2 (DWD) and C-LAEF (ZAMG). The third convection allowing model is Harmonie (KNMI). A large part of the data processing is now done in the European Weather Cloud, with thanks to ECMWF.
Besides daily forecasts of convective storms, we are going to evaluate new tools developed for forecasting and nowcasting of convective storms. This year we will concentrate on:
- Extreme Forecast Index and Shift of Tails for CAPE and CAPE-shear from ECMWF
- C-LAEF ensemble prediction system from ZAMG
- ICON-D2 ensemble prediction system from DWD
- Modified Lightning Potential Index from DWD
- KONRAD3D cell-tracking nowcasting tool from DWD
- STEPS-DWD radar nowcasting tool from DWD
- NowcastSAT satellite nowcasting tool from DWD
We are looking forward to all the participants and interesting discussions on these new products and the hopefully interesting weather situations!
We welcome external persons to join the daily Testbed weather briefings from Tuesday through Friday during Testbed weeks starting at 11:00 CEST (0900 UTC) until approximately 12:30 CEST (1030 UTC). To join, visit this link: https://bluejeans.com/720241930
