Amazing data from the Europeans

The European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecast's computer models are world-renowned for their forecasting ability.  You likely hear it mentioned in current-day weather forecasts from meteorologists.  It gained a lot of attention during the days leading up to "Super Storm" Sandy.  Personally, I've been using the European computer model (ECMWF) since I first started to learn to forecast in 1997.  Since that time, it is the model I most lean on when putting together my forecasts.

It is pretty amazing the resources the European forecast office puts towards the computer model.  It is miles and miles ahead of what the United States puts towards its global forecast model, the GFS.

• There are 21 member states and 13 co-operating states involved in the project.
• The office has an annual budget of approximately $88-million.
• Their system collects 40-million observations a day by more than 50 instruments.
• Their medium-range computer model runs twice a day (morning and evening).
• For the medium-range computer model, over 3-million points of data are ingested in to the computer model before it begins running calculations.
• The supercomputers used operate with a sustained speed of 200 trillion floating point operations per second.

Here's a closer look at the data ingested in to just one computer model run.  Specifically, this is from the 0z June 3 run.

• 69,627 surface observations
• 9,296 buoy observations
• 136,603 aircraft observations
• 234,543 Infrared atmospheric motion vectors
• 259,629 Water Vapor atmospheric motion vectors
• 110,560 Visible atmospheric motion vectors
• 1,314 Polar Infrared atmospheric motion vectors - Northern Hemisphere
• 3,205 Polar Infrared atmospheric motion vectors - Southern Hemisphere
• 348 Polar Water Vapor atmospheric motion vectors - Northern Hemisphere
• 7,791 Polar Water Vapor atmospheric motion vectors - Southern Hemisphere
• 638 balloon soundings
• 3,340 Pilot-profiler soundings
• 37,517 Microwave imager points
• 700,651 AMSU-A Satellite soundings
• 309,580 AMSU-B MHS Satellite soundings
• 534,853 HIRS Satellite soundings
• 511,896 SCAT Scatterometer points
• 64,450 IASI Temp/Humidity profiles
• 29,164 OZONE points
• 424,882 GRAD Clear Sky Radiance points
• 71,307 AIRS Atmospheric IR Sounding points
• 80,789 GPSRO Precipitable water soundings
• 57,023 Ground-based precipitable water soundings

TOTAL = 3,658,997 pieces of data