This data set consisting of initial conditions, boundary conditions and forcing profiles for the Single Column Model (SCM) version of the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) model, the Integrated Forecasting System (IFS). The IFS SCM is freely available through the OpenIFS project, on application to ECMWF for a licence. The data were produced and tested for IFS CY40R1, but will be suitable for earlier model cycles, and also for future versions assuming no new boundary fields are required by a later model. The data are archived as single time-stamp maps in netCDF files. If the data are extracted at any lat-lon location and the desired timestamps concatenated (e.g. using netCDF operators), the resultant file is in the correct format for input into the IFS SCM.

The data covers the Tropical Indian Ocean/Warm Pool domain spanning 20S-20N, 42-181E. The data are available every 15 minutes from 6 April 2009 0100 UTC for a period of ten days. The total number of grid points over which an SCM can be run is 480 in the longitudinal direction, and 142 latitudinally. With over 68,000 independent grid points available for evaluation of SCM simulations, robust statistics of bias can be estimated over a wide range of boundary and climatic conditions.

The initial conditions and forcing profiles were derived by coarse-graining high resolution (4 km) simulations produced as part of the NERC Cascade project, dataset ID xfhfc (also available on CEDA). The Cascade dataset is archived once an hour. The dataset was linearly interpolated in time to produce the 15-minute resolution required by the SCM. The resolution of the coarse-grained data corresponds to the IFS T639 reduced gaussian grid (approx 32 km). The boundary conditions are as used in the operational IFS at resolution T639. The coarse graining procedure by which the data were produced is detailed in Christensen, H. M., Dawson, A. and Holloway, C. E., 'Forcing Single Column Models using High-resolution Model Simulations', in review, Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems (JAMES).

For full details of the parent Cascade simulation, see Holloway et al (2012). In brief, the simulations were produced using the limited-area setup of the MetUM version 7.1 (Davies et al, 2005). The model is semi-Lagrangian and non-hydrostatic. Initial conditions were specified from the ECMWF operational analysis. A 12 km parametrised convection run was first produced over a domain 1 degree larger in each direction, with lateral boundary conditions relaxed to the ECMWF operational analysis. The 4 km run was forced using lateral boundary conditions computed from the 12 km parametrised run, via a nudged rim of 8 model grid points. The model has 70 terrain-following hybrid levels in the vertical, with vertical resolution ranging from tens of metres in the boundary layer, to 250 m in the free troposphere, and with model top at 40 km. The time step was 30 s.

The Cascade dataset did not include archived soil variables, though surface sensible and latent heat fluxes were archived. When using the dataset, it is therefore recommended that the IFS land surface scheme be deactivated and the SCM forced using the surface fluxes instead. The first day of Cascade data exhibited evidence of spin-up. It is therefore recommended that the first day be discarded, and the data used from April 7 - April 16.

The software used to produce this dataset are freely available to interested users;

1. "cg-cascade"; NCL software to produce OpenIFS forcing fields from a high-resolution MetUM simulation and necessary ECMWF boundary files.

https://github.com/aopp-pred/cg-cascade

Furthermore, software to facilitate the use of this dataset are also available, consisting of;

2. "scmtiles"; Python software to deploy many independent SCMs over a domain.

https://github.com/aopp-pred/scmtiles

3. "openifs-scmtiles"; Python software to deploy the OpenIFS SCM using scmtiles.

https://github.com/aopp-pred/openifs-scmtiles