Real-time NWP simulations over north-Africa and Morocco using the Unified Environmental Modeling System (UEMS)

Abstract

Weather forecasting is a very challenging task due to dynamical and nonlinear structures associated to the atmosphere. In fact, the atmosphere is described as a chaotic system; this means that small changes at a point in time can lead to large changes later in the forecast period. Despite its complexity, numerical weather prediction models (NWP) are good tools that allow us to make a big step forward in weather forecasting because of the huge increases in computing power and better physical modelling schemes available today. In this work we summarize the achieved tasks of the implementation of a real-time NWP simulation using the Unified Environmental Modeling System (UEMS) over north-Africa and Morocco. Technical and operational characteristics of our real-time weather forecast system will be described, and a case study will be illustrated on a real meteorological situation. The validation of our model is performed based on comparisons against surface and upper air observations, using the verification package of the Model Evaluation Tools (MET).