SINFONY – The Seamless INtegrated Forecasting sYstem of DWD II

Project SINFONY is an ongoing project at DWD for developing the new „Seamless INtegrated FOrecastINg sYstem—SINFONY“ that yields very-short-range forecasts from 0-12 hours without much inconsistencies. At present, forecasts of up to 2 h are based upon nowcasting whereas longer forecasts are mainly done by NWP, both separately and independently. There is no seamless transition of structures in forecast fields over lead time from Nowcasting to NWP.
To narrow down this gap, SINFONY works on different aspects of the problem with an „integrated“ team: Improving the two forecast techniques by themselves (Nowcasting and NWP with its associated ensemble data assimilation) and, in postprocessing, develop optimally combined „seamless“ forecast products for each lead time. The combined products shall also reduce the vast forecast informations to a manageable level to be efficiently used in forecasting practice. The last point is especially important because SINFONY will be based on full NWP- and Nowcasting ensembles at all levels. In the current first project stage the focus is on precipitation related quantities for summertime convection (thunderstorms and heavy precipitation) such as precipitation and radar reflectivity fields as well as „convective cell objects“.
In this second presentation on SINFONY the general concept will shortly be recapitulated before the focus will be laid on the NWP component, which comprises advanced data assimilation of new remote sensing data sources (3D radar volume data, visible satellite channels, lightning) and hourly new forecasts of a regional convection alllowing km-scale ICON-D2 model (“Rapid Update Cycle”). In addition, to support a quick and easy interpretation, SINFONY seeks to strengthen the visualization of model forecasts in observation space (radar, satellite, cell objects).