Interoperability

In Europe other consortia beside COSMO develop and operate limited area models (LAM). These consortia and their corresponding models are:

• ALADIN (National weather services from France, Belgium, Portugal, Eastern Europe and North West Africa)
• HIRLAM (National weather services from Holland, Spain and Northern Europe)
• Unified Model (National weather service of the UK)

Until now it has been difficult to exchange data between the models, because the output of the models varies much in format, geometry and parameters.

Interoperability aims to overcome this hindrance by establishing a framework for exchanging model output data in an straightforward way. This will provide the national weather services access to LAM data of other nations’ services for forecast visualization purposes, for common verification, and for operational back-up. Moreover this project facilitates future multi-model ensemble activities in Europe. The aim is for any one LAM to be able to be run from any other LAM or from any one of the four global models. The COSMO model for instance could not only be driven with IFS data but also with ALADIN, HIRLAM, or Unified Model data.