We investigated to what extent the isentropic, non-geostrophic formulation of zonally averaged circulation derived for stratospheric conditions is applicable to climatological transport in the extratropical troposphere and lower stratosphere. The study is based on 10 years of daily data of ECMWF analysis and on the ECHAM3 climate model of the German Climate Computing Centre. The main result is ...

The global availability of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) wave mode data from the European Remote Sensing (ERS) satellites ERS-1 and ERS-2, as well as ENVISAT, allows for the investigation of the wind field over the ocean on a global and continuous basis. For this purpose, 27 days of ERS-2 SAR wave mode data were processed, representing a total of 34 310 imagettes of size 10 km 5 km, available ...

The 40-yr ECMWF Re-Analysis (ERA-40) data are analyzed to demonstrate that wave forcing at lower latitudes plays a crucial role in driving the tropical upwelling portion of the Brewer–Dobson circulation. It is shown that subtropical wave forcing is correlated with tropical upwelling on both intraseasonal and interannual time scales when transient waves are taken into account, and that tropical ...

[1] Ten years of high-resolution radiosonde data are contrasted with fifteen years of ECMWF reanalysis (ERA) data to explore the tropopause region above two midlatitude stations (Munich and Stuttgart) in Southern Germany. We present time-averaged vertical profiles of several meteorological parameters relative to the tropopause. A strong mean inversion at the tropopause is evident from the radio...

[1] The vulnerability of society on extreme weather has resulted in extensive research on the statistics of extremes. Although the theoretical framework of extreme value statistics is well developed, meteorological applications are often limited by the relative shortness of the available datasets. In order to overcome this problem, we use archived data from all past seasonal forecast ensemble r...

Contributing Authors: R. Adler (USA), L. Alexander (UK, Australia, Ireland), H. Alexandersson (Sweden), R. Allan (UK), M.P. Baldwin (USA), M. Beniston (Switzerland), D. Bromwich (USA), I. Camilloni (Argentina), C. Cassou (France), D.R. Cayan (USA), E.K.M. Chang (USA), J. Christy (USA), A. Dai (USA), C. Deser (USA), N. Dotzek (Germany), J. Fasullo (USA), R. Fogt (USA), C. Folland (UK), P. Forste...

The atmospheric properties above three sites (Dome C, Dome A and the South Pole) on the Internal Antarctic Plateau are investigated for astronomical applications using the monthly median of the analyses from ECMWF (the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts). Radiosoundings extended on a yearly time scale at the South Pole and Dome C are used to quantify the reliability of the ECMWF...

The limited-area ensemble prediction system COSMO-LEPS has been running every day at ECMWF since November 2002. A number of runs of the non-hydrostatic limited-area model Lokal Modell (LM) are available every day, nested on members of the ECMWF global ensemble. The limited-area ensemble forecasts range up to 120 h and LM-based probabilistic products are disseminated to several national and regi...

The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) provides global analyses of atmospheric humidity from the ground to the lower mesosphere. Unlike in the troposphere, in the stratosphere no humidity observations are assimilated. Humidity analyses here are essentially the results of a free-running model constrained by the ECMWF’s analysed wind fields. So far only the broad-scale fea...