The demand for greater computer power in numerical weather prediction and meteorological research is as strong as ever. The world meteorological community has tried to meet this demand by exploiting parallelism. In this field, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts has established itself as the central venue for bringing together operational weather forecasters, climate researchers and parallel computer manufacturers to share their experiences through a series of workshops held every other year. This book reports on the latest workshop (2-6 December 1996) and is an excellent overview of the success which parallel systems have gained in meteorology worldwide, and how it was achieved. In addition, future trends in computer hardware and software development and its implications for meteorological computing are outlined.

The demand for greater computer power in numerical weather prediction and meteorological research is as strong as ever, The world meteorological community has tried to meet this demand by exploiting parallelism. In this field, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts has established itself as the central venue for bringing together operational weather forecasters, climate researchers and parallel computer manufacturers to share their experiences through a series of workshops held every other year. This book reports on the latest workshop (2-6 December 1996) and is an excellent overview of the success which parallel systems have gained in meteorology worldwide, and how it was achieved. In addition, future trends in computer hardware and software development and its implications for meteorological computing are outlined.

The demand for more and more computer power in numerical weather prediction and meteorological research is as strong as ever. Previously, the world meteorological community tried to meet this demand by exploiting parallelism. In this field, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts has established itself as the central venue for bringing together operational weather forecasters, climate researchers and parallel computer manufacturers to share their experiences through a series of workshops held every other year. This book reports on the latest such workshop. It gives an excellent overview of the latest achievements in this field. The demand for and the developments towards Teracomputing, the next order of magnitude in meteorological supercomputing, are given particular attention.

Geosciences and in particular numerical weather prediction are demanding the highest levels of available computer power. The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, with its experience in using supercomputers in this field, organizes every other year a workshop bringing together manufacturers, computer scientists, researchers and operational users to share their experiences and to learn about the latest developments. This book provides an excellent overview of the latest achievements in and plans for the use of new parallel techniques in meteorology, climatology and oceanography.The proceedings have been selected for coverage in: ? Index to Scientific & Technical Proceedings (ISTP CDROM version / ISI Proceedings)

year simulations in order to separate noise in the system from the climate change signal. Several contributing papers focused on case studies using Regional Climate Models (RCMs) linked to hydrological models, applied to the analysis of runoff under conditions of convective activity and extreme precipitation, in regions of complex topography, or stakeholder-driven investigations such as water runoff simulations in Quebec undertaken for a major utility. Thorough analyses of GCM results for the Century were reported at the Workshop, in order to illustrate the improvements in model results which have taken place in recent years, and the increasing confidence with which the models can be used for projecting climatic change in coming decades. However, there is still much room for improvement; there is also a need to address more fully the manner in which climate and impacts models (e. g. , hydrological models) can be linked, in terms of consistency and the overlap between different scales, the underlying physical assumptions, and the parameterizations used. Session 2 was devoted to the two extremes of water resources, namely floods and droughts, the focus here being to identify the climate change component in river floods. These have significant economic implications, as was shown by several scientists from Western and Central Europe. Many long time series have been studied worldwide with the aim of detection of nonstationarities, yet there is no conclusive evidence of climate-related changes in flow records, in general.