Simon T. K. Lang

Evaluation of Medium-Range Forecasts for Hurricane Sandy

AbstractOn 30 October 2012 Hurricane Sandy made landfall on the U.S. East Coast with a devastating impact. Here the performance of the ECMWF forecasts (both high resolution and ensemble) are evaluated together with ensemble forecasts from other numerical weather prediction centers, available from The Observing System Research and Predictability Experiment (THORPEX) Interactive Grand Global Ensemble (TIGGE) archive. The sensitivity to sea surface temperature (SST) and model resolution for the ECMWF forecasts are explored. The results show that the ECMWF forecasts provided a clear indication of the landfall from 7 days in advance. Comparing ensemble forecasts from different centers, the authors find the ensemble forecasts from ECMWF to be the most consistent in the forecast of the landfall of Sandy on the New Jersey coastline. The impact of the warm SST anomaly off the U.S. East Coast is investigated by running sensitivity experiments with climatological SST instead of persisting the SST anomaly from the an...

Sensitivity, Structure, and Dynamics of Singular Vectors Associated with Hurricane Helene (2006)

AbstractThe sensitivity of singular vectors (SVs) associated with Hurricane Helene (2006) to resolution and diabatic processes is investigated. Furthermore, the dynamics of their growth are analyzed. The SVs are calculated using the tangent linear and adjoint model of the integrated forecasting system (IFS) of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts with a spatial resolution up to TL255 (~80 km) and 48-h optimization time. The TL255 moist (diabatic) SVs possess a three-dimensional spiral structure with significant horizontal and vertical upshear tilt within the tropical cyclone (TC). Also, their amplitude is larger than that of dry and lower-resolution SVs closer to the center of Helene. Both higher resolution and diabatic processes result in stronger growth being associated with the TC compared to other flow features. The growth of the SVs in the vicinity of Helene is associated with baroclinic and barotropic mechanisms. The combined effect of higher resolution and diabatic processes leads...

Single Precision in Weather Forecasting Models: An Evaluation with the IFS

AbstractEarth’s climate is a nonlinear dynamical system with scale-dependent Lyapunov exponents. As such, an important theoretical question for modeling weather and climate is how much real information is carried in a model’s physical variables as a function of scale and variable type. Answering this question is of crucial practical importance given that the development of weather and climate models is strongly constrained by available supercomputer power. As a starting point for answering this question, the impact of limiting almost all real-number variables in the forecasting mode of ECMWF Integrated Forecast System (IFS) from 64 to 32 bits is investigated. Results for annual integrations and medium-range ensemble forecasts indicate no noticeable reduction in accuracy, and an average gain in computational efficiency by approximately 40%. This study provides the motivation for more scale-selective reductions in numerical precision.

Global Distribution of the Skill of Tropical Cyclone Activity Forecasts on Short- to Medium-Range Time Scales

AbstractOperational global medium-range ensemble forecasts of tropical cyclone (TC) activity (genesis plus the subsequent track) are systematically evaluated to understand the skill of the state-of-the-art ensembles in forecasting TC activity as well as the relative benefits of a multicenter grand ensemble with respect to a single-model ensemble. The global ECMWF, JMA, NCEP, and UKMO ensembles are evaluated from 2010 to 2013 in seven TC basins around the world. The verification metric is the Brier skill score (BSS), which is calculated within a 3-day time window over a forecast length of 2 weeks to examine the skill from short- to medium-range time scales (0–14 days). These operational global medium-range ensembles are capable of providing guidance on TC activity forecasts that extends into week 2. Multicenter grand ensembles (MCGEs) tend to have better forecast skill (larger BSSs) than does the best single-model ensemble, which is the ECMWF ensemble in most verification time windows and most TC basins. T...

Potential Vorticity Dynamics of Forecast Errors: A Quantitative Case Study

AbstractSynoptic-scale error growth near the tropopause is investigated from a process-based perspective. Following previous work, a potential vorticity (PV) error tendency equation is derived and ...