Incorporating the North Atlantic Oscillation into the post‐processing of MOGREPS‐G wind speed forecasts

Abstract

Changes in the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) heavily influence the weather across the UK and the rest of Europe. Due to an imperfect reconstruction of the polar jet stream and associated pressure systems, there is reason to believe that errors in numerical weather prediction models may also depend on the prevailing behaviour of the NAO. To address this, information regarding the NAO is incorporated into statistical post-processing methods through a regime-dependent mixture model, which is then applied to wind speed forecasts from the Met Office s global ensemble prediction system, MOGREPS-G. The mixture model offers substantial improvements upon conventional post-processing methods when the wind speed depends strongly on the NAO, but the additional complexity of the model can hinder forecast performance in other instances. A measure of regime-dependency is thus defined that can be used to differentiate between situations when the numerical model output is, and is not, expected to benefit from regimedependent post-processing. Implementing the regime-dependent mixture model only when this measure exceeds a certain threshold is found to further improve predictive performance, while also producing more accurate forecasts of extreme wind speeds.