TEAMx

The TEAMx meteorological field campaign took place in 2025 in a region of the Alps across the Inn and Adige valleys in Austria and Italy. Many observations from ground-based automated weather stations and turbulence measurement sites are routinely available in this area. In addition, hundreds of weather balloon launches, continuous observations from remote-sensing platforms, and airborne measurements from three research aircraft took place during TEAMx. These special observations permitted to observe the state of the atmosphere accurately in 3D, not only at the surface.

In the current practice, field-campaign observations are integrated qualitatively but not merged into a consistent dataset. Thus, the information content of the expensive measurements is not fully exploited by the scientific community. In the TEAMx reanalysis project, we aim at distilling information from the array of TEAMx observations into an easy-to-use consensus dataset, a gridded estimate of the evolving atmospheric state, which is called the 'analysis'.

The computation of the TEAMx analysis relies on data assimilation methods, which combine atmospheric observations with an ensemble of simulations. The ensemble quantifies simulation uncertainty: the more different the ensemble members, the greater the uncertainty. The observations and the ensemble are blended in a procedure that gives more weight to the least uncertain pieces of information. This project uses the ICON weather model and the KENDA data assimilation system, used by the German and Swiss national weather services for operational forecasts. Here, these tools are used for the first time to produce an analysis at 125-m mesh size, which will serve as a term of reference to improve the modelling of near-surface atmospheric turbulence.

Our partners on this project are the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, the Deutscher Wetterdienst, MeteoSwiss, and the University of Innsbruck.