The “Weather Replay” application from Copernicus recreates past weather conditions for any location and time
A new application from Copernicus Climate Change Service called “Weather Replay” works like a time machine, allowing users to explore and visualise historical weather and climate events — such as storms, heatwaves, floods, hurricanes and cyclones — and their evolution over time in a simple and accessible way anywhere in the world.
The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), implemented by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), has launched a new application that could prove useful as a resource for producing future weather and climate reports.
The new Weather Replay application allows users to relive the weather conditions of any place in the world, hour by hour, from January 1940 to just a few days before the present. To do this, it uses the ERA5 reanalysis dataset, the ARCO archive system and ECMWF’s powerful data repositories.
An online time machine
This tool works like a time machine, allowing users to explore and visualise historical weather and climate events, such as storms, heatwaves, floods, hurricanes and cyclones, and their evolution over time.
It includes a selection of major historical events, such as Hurricane Katrina, Cyclone Nargis which made landfall in Myanmar in May 2008, and the 2003 European heatwave. It also allows users to freely explore any period or location in the world to observe the weather on significant dates or during historical events.
Chiara Cagnazzo, lead scientist at C3S, oversees the production of many of the new applications recently launched by the service. She stated: “Weather Replay is an impressive example of the potential of our ERA5 reanalysis dataset, as well as the overall infrastructure of ECMWF’s data repositories. It is part of a broader effort to make our data more accessible to the media and the general public, and includes applications such as Thermal Trace, ERA Explorer, Climate Pulse and others. It could be a game changer in helping people explore and understand our data.”
As the application combines historical reanalysis data with near real-time updates, it may prove useful for:
- Contextualised information on extreme weather events.
- Historical comparisons and anniversaries.
- Climate explanations and background research.
- Data-driven visualisation and storytelling.
The available variables include, among others:
- Temperature
- Wind and wind gusts
- Precipitation
- Mean sea-level pressure
- Atmospheric conditions at altitude and jet stream patterns
The full article explaining the tool and all of its features is available here.
The complete Weather Replay application and all of its features are available here: weather-replay.climate.copernicus.eu
Source: Copernicus-ECMWF