Large amounts of weather and satellite data are exchanged each day routinely in real-time around the world. Pre-defined and standardised data formats are essential to be able to make use of such weather information and observations. The GRIdded Binary format (GRIB) is the primary World Meteorological Organization format for the storage and transmission of two-dimensional weather and climate grids, including the all-important numerical weather forecasts.

ECMWF has developed ecCodes: a package developed by ECMWF which provides an application programming interface and a set of tools for decoding and encoding messages in the following formats:

• WMO FM-92 GRIB edition 1 and edition 2

ecCodes relies on a useful set of command line tools to provide quick access to the messages. C, Fortran 90 and Python interfaces provide access to the main ecCodes functionality.

By the end of the course, participants will be familiar with a set of command line tools which provide an easy way to access and modify information contained in a GRIB. They will also learn how to use encoding and decoding functions in their script

Businesses and organisations, who are providing services to customers, know the importance of job schedulers which orchestrate the execution and facilitate the integration of processes that run on different computers. Such job scheduler, or workload automation, provides a point of control to monitor unattended computer programs.

ecFlow is the work flow package, developed at ECMWF, that enables users to run a large number of programmes (with dependencies on each other and on time) in a controlled environment. It provides reasonable tolerance for hardware and software failures, combined with good restart capabilities. It is used at ECMWF for most of our operational suites, across a range of platforms.

ecFlow executes tasks (jobs) and receives acknowledgements from the associated job when it changes status or when it sends events. It does this using using child commands embedded in the scripts.

ecFlow stores the relationship between tasks and is able to submit tasks dependent on triggers.

ecFlow is complemented by ecFlowview, its graphical interface that allow users to have immediate grasp, using colour coding, on the status of the various programs or processes handled by the scheduler.

The course will look at the various elements of the scheduler and its graphical interface. By the end of the course participants will have a good understanding of the various features of ecFlow and shall be capable of designing their own suite.

The objective of this course is to assist Member States and Co-operating States in advanced training on the operational aspects of the ECMWF forecasting system. The course is focussed on the operational aspects of the ECMWF forecasting system. The aim of the module is to increase the student's ability to examine and assess ECMWF output products. It is directed towards those staff who are (or will be) using ECMWF products either directly as forecasting staff, or in research and development work and to trainers and training champions. The course is aimed at maximising the benefits to the users of the Centre's products.

Lectures on aspects of ECMWF forecasting systems will be complemented with practical sessions where the students will use ECMWF in real case situations. Students will be given the opportunity to familiarise themselves with recently developed web applications for data visualisation.

The ensemble prediction system (ENS) will be presented and the range of available products will be introduced. A large part of the module will be devoted to the interpretation of these products and to the evaluation of their quality. Potential benefits of the probabilistic formulation of the forecast for medium range to seasonal range applications will also be demonstrated.

There will be two editions of this course: the first for trainers and training champions and the second open to all.