WMO Research Demonstration Project: Paris Olympic Games 2024

The WMO World Weather Research Programme (WWRP) “promotes international and interdisciplinary research for more accurate and reliable forecasts from minutes to seasons, expanding the frontiers of weather science to enhance society’s resilience to high-impact weather and the value of weather information for users. WWRP aims at Seamless Prediction by increasing convergence between weather, climate and environmental approaches.” In the 2016-2022 WWRP implementation plan, activities focus on 4 challenges: High-Impact Weather, Water, Urbanization, Evolving technologies. Furthermore, the WMO Global Atmosphere Watch Urban Research Meteorology and Environment (GURME) focus on the development of models and associated research activities to enhance the capabilities in providing urban-environmental forecasting and air quality services of high quality, illustrating the linkages between meteorology and air quality (https://public.wmo.int/en/programmes).

This talk presents an international Research Demonstration Project (RDP), that will focus on research on scientific urban issues addressed by both WWRP and GURME. RDPs are to undertake the necessary R&D leading to the development and demonstration of improved and cost-effective forecasting techniques, with emphasis on high impact weather, and to promote their application among Member States of WMO. They aim to build coordinated actions between Meteorological institutes of at least 5 countries on specific topics and operational questions.

Previous summer Olympics Forecast Demonstration projects took place for Sydney 2000 and Beijing 2008. The scientific objectives of these focused both on the nowcasting and predictability of thunderstorms at regional scale, using radar, satellite, surface station observations, feature detection and nowcast systems, NWP models with 3-5 km horizontal resolutions and, for the Beijing, NWP models blended systems at 3-5km resolution. Automated nowcast systems run during the Sydney and Beijing Forecast Demonstration Projects had horizontal resolutions of 1-3 km. To capture and resolve the effects of urban meteorology, state-of-the-art models need to be run at even higher resolutions.

The strategic objective of this proposed RDP is to focus on the Olympic Games of Paris in 2024 in order to advance research on the theme of the “future Meteorological Forecasting systems at 100m (or finer) resolution for urban areas”. Such systems would prefigure the numerical weather prediction at the horizon 2030. The focus will be on themes related to extreme events in summer which are linked to urbanization: thunderstorms and strong Urban Heat Islands, and their consequences.

There are 5 scientific questions that will be addressed during this Paris RDP cover:

1. Nowcasting & Numerical Weather Prediction in cities at about 100m resolution

2. High resolution thunderstorm nowcasting (probabilistic and deterministic) in the urban environment, Urban heat islands and cool areas, air quality, in cities

3. Nowcasting and forecast in coastal cities (for the Marseilles site)

4. Big data, non-conventional data, and their uses

5. Conception and Communication of tailored weather, climate, environmental information at infra-urban resolution.

This RDP is open to any organization interested to these questions that wish to participate. The necessary data will be provided to the partners. Several storm cases and heat waves are being identified to provide case studies, including the extreme heat waves that just occurred in June and July 2019 in France. Open urban data describing the agglomerations at very high resolution (the urban block) will also be provided. In order to provide additional meteorological observations, an experimental campaign on the Paris agglomeration is envisaged for the summer 2021. It will both help to improve the nowcasting and NWP systems at urban scale, and aim to define the required additional instrumentation that should be deployed during the Olympics games themselves. Partners will be invited to provide, if they wish, high-resolution NWP forecasts during the Olympics. This talk will describe these scientific questions, as well as the proposed framework of the RDP.