88th Annual Meeting (20-24 January 2008)

Thursday, 24 January 2008: 3:45 PM
Climatology and interannual variability of mid-latitude storms in the NCEP CFS model
215-216 (Ernest N. Morial Convention Center)
Timothy Eichler, Saint Louis University, Saint Louis, Mo; and W. Higgins
Extreme weather events such as floods, droughts, and hurricanes significantly impact transportation, industry, and the public. Accurate forecasts of their intensity, duration, and location are needed to mitigate their impacts. Currently, weather and climate models have low skill in predicting extreme weather events due to: a) lack of understanding of key physical processes such as convection and b) insufficient horizontal and vertical resolution to simulate mesoscale phenomena such as fronts and thunderstorms. However, as climate models continue to improve, it is becoming increasingly appropriate to investigate and document their weather phenomena. This research demonstrates the ability of the CFS model to simulate synoptic scale northern hemisphere storm track climatology and intensity by deploying storm-tracking software designed to track minima in sea-level pressure. Since storm tracks vary due to climate drivers such as ENSO and the NAO, an assessment of how model-simulated storms behave in relation to these phenomena will also be presented.

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