Description of upgrade

IFS Cycle 45r1 is an upgrade with many scientific contributions, including changes in data assimilation (both in the EDA and the 4DVAR), in the use of observations, and in modelling. The new cycle only includes meteorological changes; there are no technical changes, e.g. new resolutions.

The page will be updated as required. It was last changed on 20.03.2018.

For a record of changes made to this page please refer to  Document versions.

Further information and advice regarding the upgrade can be obtained from User Support.

Timetable for implementation

The planned timetable for the implementation of the cycle 45r1 is as follows:

The timetable represents current expectations and may change in light of actual progress made.

Current Status

The Alpha testing of cycle 45r1 will continue and the cycle is being passed to the Forecast Department to start the Beta testing.

Meteorological content of the new cycle

Assimilation

• Weakly coupled sea-ice atmosphere assimilation applied with the use of OCEAN5 sea-ice (instead of OSTIA) in the surface analysis of the high-resolution (HRES 4d-Var) and the ensemble of data assimilations (EDA) analyses;
• Relative humidity increments calculated using temperature instead of virtual temperature;
• Weak constraint model error forcing applied at every time step instead of every hour to avoid shocks in the model integration.

Observations

• Assimilation of non-surface-sensitive infra-red (IR) channels over land;
• Assimilation of all sky micro-wave (MW) sounding channels over coasts;
• Use of direct broadcast FY-3C MWHS2 data for better timeliness;
• Introduction of RTTOV-12 and new microwave instrument coefficients;
• Activation of constrained variational bias correction (VarBC);
• Retuning of the radiosonde observation error, and introduction of a scheme to account for radiosonde drift;

• Assimilation of BUFR SYNOP data into the surface analysis;

• Introduction of temperature bias correction of old-style AIREP observations; aircraft temperature varBC predictor upgraded to a three predictor model (cruise, ascent, descent); reduced thinning of aircraft data;

• Assimilation of JASON-3 and Sentinel-3A altimeters, and use of new altimeters for wave data assimilation;

Model

• Coupling of the 3-dimentional ocean and atmosphere: introduction of the coupling to the NEMO 3-dimentional ocean model also in the high-resolution long forecast (HRES), with the same ocean model version used in the medium-range/monthly ensemble (ENS): NEMO3.4 in ORCA025_Z75 configuration; upgrade of the NEMO-IFS coupling strategy in both ENS and HRES to a full-coupling in the tropical region (partial-coupling-extra-tropics);
• Improved numerics for warm-rain cloud microphysics and vertical extrapolation for semi-lagrangian trajectory;
• Increased methane oxidation rate to improve (increase) water vapor in the stratosphere;
• Improved representation of super-cooled liquid water in convection, and minor convection updates;
• Improvements in the tangent forward and adjoint models linked to the convection scheme;
• Correction of soil thermal conductivity formulation and addition of soil ice dependency;
• New extended output parameters have been added. See below.
• Modified parameter for non-orographic gravity-wave drag scheme for 91 levels;
• Model error changes:
  • SPPT scheme: improved flow-dependent error representation via reduced spread in clear skies regions (due to unperturbed radiative-tendency in clear sky), activation of tendency perturbations in stratosphere, and weaker tapering of perturbations in boundary layer; amplitude reduction of the SPPT perturbations patterns (by 20%);
  • EDA: cycling of stochastic physics random fields in the EDA, and adoption of the same SPPT configuration in EDA as in ENS;
  • SKEB scheme: deactivation of the stochastic backscatter (SKEB) scheme due to improved model error representation by the SPPT scheme (see above), leading to a 2.5% cost saving in Leg A of ENS;

Meteorological impact of the new cycle

Technical details of the new cycle

Changes to GRIB encoding

Model identifiers

The GRIB model identifiers (generating process identification number) for cycle 45r1 will be changed as follows:

New model output parameters

Extended output have been added in cycle 45r1, including precipitation rates, CAPE indices and a total lighting flash density.

paramId	Shortname	name	Description	units	GRIB edition	Component	Test data available	Dissemination	ecCharts	Proposed for Catalogue
228050	litoti	Instantaneous total lightning density	Total lightning flash density (instantaneous)	flashes km-2 day-1	1	HRES / ENS			TBC
228051	litota	Averaged total lightning density since previous post-processing	Total lightning flash density (averaged between consecutive post-processing time steps)	flashes km-2 day-1	1	HRES / ENS			TBC
228057	litota3	Averaged total lightning flash density over the past 3 hours	Averaged total (cloud-to-ground + intra-cloud) lightning flash density over the past 3 hours.	flashes km-2 day-1	2	HRES / ENS			TBC
228058	litota6	Averaged total lightning flash density over the past 6 hours	Averaged total (cloud-to-ground + intra-cloud) lightning flash density over the past 6 hours	flashes km-2 day-1	2	HRES / ENS			TBC
260048	tprate	Total precipitation rate	Total precipitation rate (instantaneous)	kg m-2 s-1	2	HRES / ENS			TBC
228035	mxcape6	maximum CAPE in the last 6 hours	Maximum CAPE in last 6 hours	J kg-1	2	HRES / ENS			TBC
228036	mxcapes6	maximum CAPES in the last 6 hours	Maximum CAPESHEAR in last 6 hours	m2 s-2	2	HRES / ENS			TBC

Document versions