AN OVERVIEW ON RECENT PROGRESSES OF THE OPERATIONAL NUMERICAL WEATHER PREDICTION MODELS

The year 2004 is a special year for Numerical Weather Prediction, because it is the 100 anniversary for proposition of Numerical Weather Prediction theory, as well as the 50 anniversary of operational implementation of NWP. Now a century has past, NWP theory and application have made a great progress, particularly in recent more than 10 years, with rapid development of atmospheric science and geoscience, as well as high perfor-mance computers, the improvements of NWP are accelerating. In this paper, it is tried to give a brief overview of the dynamic core, physical parameterization and model program software of current operational NWP models, to discuss on the existing problems, and to outlook the future development of the operational NWP models. The main development features of the current operational NWP models are as:(1) Since the middle 90s of last century, the resolutions of the global/regional NWP have been increased considerably. The physical schemes have been improved by incorporating with the dynamical cores. We are in the phase where the parallelized codes were widely used in the NWP model of the operational met eorological centers in the world. (2) The developed countries, as well as CMA (China Meteorological Administration) have made a lot of efforts to develop their own new generation of operational NWP models-non-hydrostatical (multi-scale) unified models or non-hydrostatical meso-scale models. And some of the new generation of weather-climate unified models, have been put into operation. (3) The operational NWP models are progressing continuously. With the increasing of the model resolution, more and more attention will be paid to the microphysics, land surface, 3 dimensionalturbulences, radiation with the impacts of topographical slopes, choice of the vertical coordinates as well. The behaviors of these physical schemes are essential for further improvements of operational NWP models.