Its purpose, its organisation, and its results. The aim of the project is to develop and maintain a numerical short-range weather forecasting system for operational use by the participating institutes. The project has started in 1985. The management group is advised by a Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee.
Most institutes use a six hours data assimilation cycle, but some use a three hours cycle.
Sea surface temperature, ice and snow coverage are analysed with a successive correction method, originating from SMHI . Initialisation A digital filetering mode initialisation scheme is used. The model is a hydrostatic grid-point model and the resolutions presently in use are 55 to 5 km horizontally and 16 to 31 levels in the vertical. The time stepping is semi-implicit, Eulerian and we use a fourth order, linear horizontal diffusion. Surface processes are handled in a two layer scheme with snow, ice and soil moisture included.