The 5th Working Group on Numerical Experimentation (WGNE) workshop on systematic errors in weather and climate models was held in Montréal, Canada from 19 to 23 June 2017. The principal goal of the workshop is to increase understanding of the nature and cause of errors in models used for weather and climate prediction, including intra-seasonal to inter-annual scales.
The workshop is held every four years. The 5th WGNE workshop focused on processes that models currently fail to represent accurately, based around six themes: atmosphere-land-ocean-cryosphere interactions, clouds and precipitation, resolution issues, teleconnections, metrics and diagnostics, and model errors in ensembles. For each of the themes, the workshop started off with talks from invited keynote speakers, followed by contributed oral presentations, a conclusion session and a poster session.
My PhD project studies mean-state precipitation biases over the Maritime Continent in CMIP5 atmosphere-only experiments, which aligns well with the “model errors in ensembles” workshop theme. I received a lot of constructive feedback and suggestions during the discussions in the poster session.
A mixture of scientific and social activities were organized in this workshop dedicated to Early Career Scientists (ECS). We had the opportunity to be a session rapporteur and participate in a best poster competition. Then we were given the chance to get to know more established scientists during the more social ‘lunch-with-experts’ and ‘pub night’ activities. The lunch-with-experts was truly entertaining – with conversations about PhD life and challenges, future career path advice, variations between countries in PhD education systems and much more! ECS were also given the opportunity to become co-reviewer of a poster competition session where we work in pairs with an expert scientist to review posters in a session we are not competing in. By becoming the co-reviewer, we get to experience the review process and get in contact with expert scientists.
On the last day, the session rapporteur presented a summary on the main issues discussed in each session, followed by a panel discussion and an overall conclusion to the workshop. I am very happy that my poster on ‘Maritime Continent seasonal climate biases in AMIP experiments of the CMIP5 multimodel ensemble’ was given the Best Poster Award, alongside with Falko Judt for his poster on ‘Effect of model error on the predictability of hurricane intensity’ and Danahé Paquin-Ricard for her poster on ‘The role and impact of a deep convective parameterization on Km-scale atmospheric forecasts’ during the closing session.
Lastly, I also got to do some sightseeing while I was in Montréal after the workshop. From the amazing Notre-Dame Basilica, great views of the city from Mont Royal and the underground city to escape the weather, Montréal has so much to offer!
I am thankful to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) for providing me the travel funding to attend the workshop and present my poster. Also many thanks go to Ariane Frassoni for organising the pub nights and facilitating the ECS activities, as well as for providing the photos for this post.
The Social Metwork 