The first draft of the ECMWF Convention was considered on 9 and 10 December 1971, with 32 senior representatives from 14 of the 18 founding States attending. The Convention was signed in 1973 and came into force on 1 November 1975. Its creation set up the centre as an independent intergovernmental organisation.
The Convention set up the Centre as an independent international organisation.
A Danish national, Professor Askel Wiin-Nielsen was ECMWF’s first Director from 1 January 1974 to 31 December 1979. He put ECMWF on track to become a world leader in global numerical weather prediction.
In order to run weather forecast models within a schedule that has reasonably short timeslots, powerful supercomputer systems are required. The first version of the ECMWF weather forecasting model was developed on a Control Data Corporation 6600 computer from 1975 to 1978.
Co-operation agreement with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO)
Having been ratified by 13 Member States, the ECMWF Convention entered into force on 1 November 1975 and the Centre became an intergovernmental organisation in its own right.
Germany
The first session of the Council was held from 4 to 6 November 1975.
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On 14 March 1978, a contract was signed with Service in Informatics and Analysis (SIA) Ltd. (UK) to supply the necessary telecommunications software, with a/S Regnecentralen (Denmark) as sub-contractor providing the hardware centred on an RC8000 computer. The telecommunications system was delivered to the Centre in the first week of June.
The first supercomputer owned by ECMWF was installed on 24 October 1978 at the new Shinfield Park site.
The new headquarters for the Centre were opened by H.R.H. Prince Charles, K.G, K.T., P.C., G.C.B. who was accompanied by the Lord Lieutenant of the County of Berkshire, Colonel the Honourable Gordon Palmer.
Operational forecasting on an experimental basis began on 1 August 1979, with forecasts to ten days ahead five days per week using the N48 grid model.
1 August 1980 is an important date in ECMWF's history, representing the initiation of full (7 days per week) operational forecasting.
Five new medium-speed (2400 or 4800 bps) telecommunication connections to Member States became operational during the year.
The CYBER 835 (formerly known as the 730E) was introduced into service in January and passed final acceptance in March.
Graphics facilities were improved during the year, with the following important developments:
These replaced the Cyber 175 in order to improve the interactive services and computing power for processing of meteorological data. The IBM was to be used for data storage and retrieval, with discs for fast access, a bulk storage device using magnetic cartridges and magnetic tape for archives.
The Cray-1A was replaced by a dual processor Cray X-MP/22. This had two CPUs and 16 Mbytes of memory. ECMWF used this system to pioneer the operational use of multitasking, i.e. a programming paradigm that makes use of more than one CPU by a single program.
A Graphics Project Group was established in 1984 to design and implement a second-generation system. This led to development of the Meteorological Application Graphics Integrated Colour System or MAGICS, which provided the basis for the Centre’s future graphics developments for the coming decades.
Surface pressure is computed from analysed field instead of first-guess in post-processing.
The T106 model became operational. The spectral representation in the horizontal was truncated at wavenumber 106. The vertical resolution was not changed...
The production of rain in the convective parametrisation scheme and the evaporation efficiency over land was modified due to the over-forecasting of precipitation (particularly over Europe) and the marked negative bias in the 2m temperature in daytime (in particular when dry, sunny conditions were observed).
In December 1985, a four processor CRAY X-MP/48 was installed. It replaced the CRAY X-MP/22 after passing its final acceptance test on 11 February 1986. This system had 4 CPUs with a cycle time of 9.5 nanoseconds (102 MHz), 64 Megabytes of memory, 256 Megabytes of SSD and 13 Gigabytes of disk space, with a theoretical peak performance of 800 Megaflops.
The solar heating rates were modified and the subterranean extrapolation was changed. An error in the vertical diffusion was corrected.
The 16-level model was replaced by a 19-level model. The three extra levels were introduced in the stratosphere.
The European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) was founded in 1986.
A parametrisation scheme for representing the momentum transports due to subgrid gravity wave drag was incorporated into the operational ECMWF forecast model.
The snow melt logic was corrected. The old scheme caused a drop of the surface temperature when snow had to melt on the ground at the expense of surface energy.
The NTC telecommunications system, based on Digital Equipment Company VAX computers, replaced the previous Regnecentralen computer system.
In 1987, the development of a new forecasting system started at ECMWF, the Integrated Forecasting System (IFS), although this was not the original name.
The surface and subsurface parametrisation scheme was revised. Each grid box was then divided into vegetated and bare ground parts which concerned the evaporation over land surfaces. The time evolution of the soil water content took root uptake, interruption of precipitation and collusion of dew by a skin reservoir, surface run off due to sloping terrain and gravitational drainage into account.
An IBM 3090-150E computer was installed in June 1987 for handling the very large volume of data in the Centre’s archives.
A revised vertical diffusion scheme was implemented. The turbulent diffusion was limited to below the top of the boundary layer except when static instability was generated. This modification restricted the vertical mixing to the boundary layer. The reduction of dissipation and momentum and heat mixing in the free atmosphere had a positive impact on zonal mean temperatures and reduced the zonal wind errors. The eddy activity became stronger.
The Centre co-operated with INPE (Instituto de Pesquisas Espaciais) Brazil, to produce a version of MAGICS, known as micro-MAGICS, for implementation on personal computers. A prototype of the micro-MAGICS software was demonstrated at a graphics workshop held at the centre in December 1988.
Co-operation agreement
All Member States were connected by medium-speed lines from July 1988, with various Member States upgrading within the medium-speed range.
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