It's out! After a thirty year gap, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has published the updated Guide to the WMO Integrated Processing and Prediction System (WIPPS), formerly known as the WMO Global Data-Processing and Forecasting System (GDPFS).
So why is this important? The WIPPS, despite the dry name, is one of the two most important things in operational meteorology. It's the system that defines how, after meteorological observations are freely shared in real time between countries (the *other* of the two most important things, and organised with the WMO Integrated Global Observing System (WIGOS) and WMO Information System (WIS)), the numerical predictions created using those observations are shared *back* to the world, so that everybody has free access to the best possible, quality managed, continuously improving and verified predictions. Numerical weather prediction is enormously computationally expensive, and without a system for sharing the outputs, the world would be divided into those countries who can afford to run the very best, and those with nothing at all (despite sharing their own observations into the system).
If we want communities to be able to take anticipatory action ahead of potential weather-related disasters, we want them to have the best possible weather predictions, through the WIPPS. If we want to share climate predictions, ocean predictions, tropical cyclone forecasts, emergency forecasts of nuclear material, sand and dust storm forecasts, and volcanic ash cloud forecasts, we use the WIPPS. And if we want to do these things in the most equitable possible way for societal benefit, we will use the WIPPS as an operational backbone. The Guide, alongside the more technical Manual on the WMO Integrated Processing and Prediction System, describes how to use the system, and is published in the six official WMO languages (English, French, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, Chinese).
Thank you to Eunha Lim, Yuki Honda, and the other members of the WMO Secretariat who helped us as the WMO Expert Team to renew the Guide (myself, Qingliang ZHOU, Gerhard Wotawa, Arun Kumar, Caio Coelho, Tom Robinson), and thank you in particular to Alice Soares who did the bulk of the heavy lifting. The Guide will be further expanded and improved in the coming years.
https://lnkd.in/gCESH339
Secretary-General in World Meteorological Organization
3wOn behalf of the World Meteorological Organization, a big THANK YOU!!!