84th AMS Annual Meeting

Wednesday, 14 January 2004: 9:00 AM
Seasonal prediction effort at NCEP: toward a seamless suite of forecast products
Room 6C
Wanqiu Wang, SAIC at NCEP/EMC, Camp Springs, MD; and S. Saha, G. White, and H. L. Pan
Efforts to improve the seasonal prediction using numerical models have been one of the main activities of the Global Climate and Weather Modeling Branch. We are in the process to validate the latest effort using a current operational weather forecast model (GFS03) coupled to the Modular Ocean Model version 3 (MOM3) to produce seasonal predictions. A free run of over 30 years has been conducted with this coupled model without flux-corrections in an effort to examine the model's performance in reproducing observed climatology and interannual variability. We have found the model capable to simulate the earth climate with small bias in the equatorial Sea surface Temperature (SST) ( generally less than 1 K). In addition, the coupled model is able to simulate realistic ENSO events with comparable amplitude compared to the observed and with comparable periods. We are in the process to generate a 22-year hindcast database for 1981-2002 to investigate the model's skill in ENSO prediction. Our initial forecast experiments for April and January initial conditions indicate that this coupled model is superior to the previous version of NCEP's operational coupled model. We will present the results of the hindcasts as well as the free run.

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