Last updated: 21 May 2010
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The goal of this task is to support the development of soil-vegetation-atmosphere transfer models within the SRNWP community, by providing good quality operational data from a limited set of well instrumented and high quality observation sites.
This task is done on behalf of the C-SRNWP Programme of
EUMETNET, to promote collaboration between the five
European limited area modelling
consortia.
The Consortium for Small-Scale Modelling (COSMO)
takes over the responsibility for the collection and provision of these data.
A correct representation of the land-atmosphere coupling is essential for producing high quality regional and local weather forecasts, e.g. screen level temperature, fog and low level cloudiness, mixing height, convection triggering. The phenomena taking place at the land-atmosphere interface are very complex, with many feedbacks and non-linearities; consequently, an accurate diagnostic of our model weaknesses and the subsequent improvement of the models requires a set of observations as complete as possible.
Data from field experiments are very valuable, but are limited to a fixed period of time, which is inconvenient when developing and testing operational models. There are some excellent operational observation sites in Europe, but it is always difficult to get the data from outside of ones own country. The proposed task should help to overcome this difficulty.
Participating sites are (see them in the map).
The permission for data access was kindly granted by the directors of the national meteorological services. Data of the previous year is made available within 6 months after the end of the calendar year, on a password protected page of this web site. Data is then kept at least 10 years on the web site.
Any SRNWP member may register for data access by the C-SRNWP Programme Manager. The database is also open to academic institutes for research purposes.