Wednesday, 2 April 2014: 5:15 PM
Regency Ballroom (Town and Country Resort )
The recently developed Model for Prediction Across Scales (MPAS) was used to produce global forecasts in real time during August and September of 2013. MPAS is a non-hydrostatic model, integrated on a horizontally-unstructured Voronoi mesh using a C-grid discretization appropriate for mesoscale flows. The unstructured mesh allows for a gradual transition between relatively coarse resolution over most of the globe, to higher resolution in a region of interest. In this talk, we will examine the overall performance of, and the relative differences between, two sets of forecasts. One set is comprised of 10-day forecasts on a quasi-uniform 15-km grid. The other set is composed of 10 day forecasts on a variable mesh that ranges from 60-km grid spacing over most of the globe to 15 km over the tropical Atlantic. Results indicate that the two forecasts retain high correlations for a longer time over the Atlantic than over other tropical regions. There are fairly rapid departures between the forecasts in mid-latitudes relative to the tropics. These differences are quantified, as are overall forecast errors and the errors in tropical cyclone position and intensity in the major tropical cyclone basins.
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