ECMWF: Progress and Plans (Invited Presentation)

The last decades have seen remarkable progress in numerical weather prediction. Key contributors to this have included developments in data assimilation techniques and an increased focus on the development and use of ensembles. Indeed, we have recently celebrated the 20^th anniversary of the implementation of 4D-Var and 25 years of operational ensemble prediction at ECMWF. This talk will briefly review some of the advances made, and, in particular, highlight current activities that are continuing to improve the systems. Finally, the ECMWF 2016-2025 strategy sets out ambitious goals for the coming years, with plans to move towards seamless ensembles based on more complete Earth-system models and assimilation systems. Progress in this direction will be described, and some of the outstanding challenges identified. These include the adaptation of codes and techniques to work efficiently on computer architectures of the future. This effort will require not only continued close collaboration and partnerships across the traditional NWP community, but also an increased linkage between the physical and computational science disciplines.