cleps stands for COSMO-LEPS, the Limited-area Ensemble Prediction System implemented and developed by ARPA-SIM in the framework of COSMO consortium.

This system is made up of 16 integrations with the non-hydrostatic limited-area model COSMO (formerly known as Lokal Modell).

The 16 integrations takes initial and boundary conditions from 16 selected members of ECMWF EPS; the following prodedure is used to select EPS members:

1) Two successive runs of ECMWF EPS (starting at 00 and 12UTC) are considered; since each EPS set is composed of 51 integrations, 102 members are

2) a clustering algorithm is applied to construct 16 clusters (of different population); the clustering variables are Z,U,V,Q at 500, 700, 850 hPa at +96, +120 fcst steps; the clustering domain is 30-60N, 10W-30E.

3) within each cluster a representative member (RM) is selected on the basis of the same variables used for the clustering;

4) 16 RMs are selected;

5) each RM provides both initial and boundary conditions to the limited-area integrations with the COSMO model, which is run 16 times;

6) the limited-area runs constitute COSMO-LEPS

Each limited-area runs has the following features:

start once a day at 12UTC;

hor. res. 10 km;

vert. res. 40 ML;

fcst length: 132h;

post-proc frequency: 3h

The integration domain cover the whole Central and Southern Europe, although, for D-PHASE, only a subdomain is delivered.

Grid description:

DDOM: xfirst: -6.02 yfirst: -7.0 xsize: 135.0 ysize: 83.0 xinc: 0.09 yinc: 0.09 xnpole: 190.0 ynpole: 40.0