ECMWF and NOAA have a long-standing relationship ranging from our use of NOAA’s satellite products to regular exchanges on data assimilation, the impact of data and the joint development of tools.
Dr Kathryn Sullivan, Administrator of NOAA, took the opportunity of her trip to COP21 taking place in Paris to visit us in Reading on 30 November.
Between a tour of the Computer Hall, where she had an opportunity to hear about how ECMWF uses its computer capability, and a roundtable discussion looking at how to share our respective expertise even better, she took a few minutes to give us a short interview. She talked about NOAA’s role at COP21 and more broadly on climate change, the challenges of communicating science to the public, the role of Earth observations, and more specifically the achievements of the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), and of course the partnership between our two organisations.
She focussed on the global aspect of numerical weather prediction (NWP), a consideration also very close to our hearts at ECMWF, and poetically defined it as “the ability to give human beings foresight”. She stressed that this is a first for humankind, but that “it is so common in our world that we forget how extraordinary and novel that is.”
You can listen to the inspirational words of a woman who has actually seen Planet Earth from above.