Validation of the 10-meter Winds from WRF Mesoscale Forecast over Puerto Rico

The Caribbean Regional Association (CaRA) at the University of Puerto Rico has maintained a real-time weather forecast modeling system to forecast 10-meter winds conditions over the U.S. Caribbean region. The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Advanced Research WRF (Weather Research and Forecast) model is used in the simulations. Wind speed and direction forecasted by the WRF model are verified against hourly winds from the CaRA/Weatherflow conventional observation system. A variety of verification statistics are calculated, including scatterplots, biases, absolute error, root mean square error, spatial and temporal distribution maps, contingency tables and associated scores stratification. The statistical analysis indicates that forecast wind speeds are larger than those observed for all the stations considered in this study. Biases and errors for the wind direction are much less. The highest discrepancies between the model output and observations are over the east side of Puerto Rico (i.e. Vieques and Culebra region), while the lowest discrepancies are over the San Juan area and the west side of the island.