Datasets affected

• HRES
• ENS

Resolution

Unchanged

Meteorological content

• The OSTIA (Operational Sea Surface Temperature and Sea Ice Analysis) high-resolution sea surface temperature, produced by the Met Office, and corresponding sea ice analysis (from EUMETSAT Ocean and Sea Ice SAF)
• Conserving interpolation scheme for trajectory fields in 4D- Var
• New variational bias correction ( VARBC) bias predictors to allow the correction of infrared shortwave channels affected by solar effects
• Cleaner cold-start of AMSUA channel 14 bias corrections
• Changes to physics for melting of falling snow, albedo of permanent snow cover (e.g. over Antarctica), diurnal variation of sea surface temperature, and linear parametrization schemes
• Convective contribution added to wind gusts in post-processing
• Monitoring of MERIS total-column water vapour data
• Neutral scores for the extra-tropics, and improved scores for upper tropospheric winds in the tropics.
• Improvement in both hemispheres for the late medium range.

Meteorological impact

• Improvements to the handling of melting snow as it falls
• New sea-surface temperature analysis product
  • higher-resolution
  • more frequently updated information, in particular in cloudy situations, based on a range of satellite and in-situ observations.
  • significant ice differences  in the areas with broken ice
  • largest SST differences in the Polar Regions and meanders of the major currents such as the Gulf Stream

Resources

ECMWF Newsletter: See Newsletter 120