The THORPEX Interactive Grand Global Ensemble

Ensemble forecasting is increasingly accepted as a powerful tool to improve early warnings for high-impact weather. Recently, ensembles combining forecasts from different systems have attracted a considerable level of interest. The Observing System Research and Predictability Experiment (THORPEX) Interactive Grand Globa l Ensemble (TIGGE) project, a prominent contribution to THORPEX, has been initiated to enable advanced research and demonstration of the multimodel ensemble concept and to pave the way toward operational implementation of such a system at the international level. The objectives of TIGGE are 1) to facilitate closer cooperation between the academic and operational meteorological communities by expanding the availability of operational products for research, and 2) to facilitate exploring the concept and benefits of multimodel probabilistic weather forecasts, with a particular focus on high-impact weather prediction. Ten operational weather forecasting centers producing daily global ensemble ...