AbstractSince the disaster in The Netherlands caused by a mesoscale gale on 12 May 1983, an hourly nowcasting and very short‐range forecasting system has been developed using all available hourly surface observations of pressure and wind over the North Sea and the surrounding countries.Hourly analyses and prognoses are produced using hourly interpolated background fields and lateral boundaries from the fine mesh United Kingdom prognoses, which are received from Bracknell twice a day based on 00 and 12 GMT up to 36 hours in advance at 3‐hour intervals.The computational area consists of a grid of 35 × 35 points with a grid distance of 50 km covering the North Sea and surroundings. The update and forecast model is a two‐parameter model based on filtered equations with the geopotential height fields at 500 and 1000 mb as input and output. It is called VIMOLA (vertically integrated model on limited area). A new method is used for the analysis at 1000 mb. The observations of pressure and wind are directly assimilated onto the computational grid, and in this way wind measurements are converted into pressure gradients. All 10‐minute‐mean winds are taken into account. The analysis system is called APW (assimilation of pressure and wind).Every hour analyses and prognoses are produced up to nine hours in advance. The prognoses are merged with the fine mesh U.K. prognoses, i.e. the final prognoses are a linear combination of VIMOLA prognoses and U.K. prognoses. For one hour in advance no merging takes place and after nine hours the final prognoses are identical to the U.K. prognoses.For The Netherlands and surrounding regions winds computed from the forecasts have been verified against the observations. Winds from the U.K. prognoses have been verified in the same way. The U.K. prognoses show a very good quality and a small error growth during the first 24 hours. However, the hourly incorporation of the observations gives an improvement, especially for the first hours of the forecast period.Because no upper air observations are needed, a very short data cut‐off time can be applied (20–45 minutes after the time of observation). In practice, the system is suitable for operational gale warnings and tidal surge forecasts. Due to the hourly character, the system is able to detect temporal variations in the surface wind field such as the diurnal cycle over land and air mass variability. Practical examples are given in this paper, including some results obtained for the storm of 15–16 October 1987, which hit the south‐easte