92nd American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting (January 22-26, 2012)

Wednesday, 25 January 2012: 1:30 PM
Verification of High-Resolution WRF-RTFDDA Based 4-Dimensional Weather Operational Forecasting System Over Eastern Mediterranean Region with Surface Observations
Room 238 (New Orleans Convention Center )
Linlin Pan, NCAR, Boulder, CO; and Y. Liu, D. Rostkier-Edelstein, G. Roux, Y. Zhang, Y. Liu, W. Yu, and R. S. Sheu

Model for the advanced generation of 4-dimensional weather operational forecasting system has been developed in NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research) based on NCAR WRF-RTFDDA (real-time four dimensional data assimilation) and WRFDA. The study is focused on the Eastern Mediterranean region with complex terrain and high-contrast climate-zone distributions. Three nested domains, with 30, 10 and 3.3 km grid intervals, respectfully, are applied in modeling system, and it is centered over Israel. This research investigates the high-resolution performance of the new system through objective evaluation on surface variables such as temperature, humidity and winds. The high-resolution skill of the system was tested on the 3.3 km domain forecasts. The verification investigates operational forecasting results from two separate months, with one focused on the rain period/season (February), and the other focused on the dry period/season (April). The analysis and forecasts are run every 6 hours, and 224-cycle model outputs are examined. Using the observations from 59 stations over domain 3, the model outputs are validated objectively. The statistics of the system performance is calculated on a station-by-station basis as well as for the grid average in terms of traditional metrics such as domain/station average bias, root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE), and the correlation between observation and model outputs. Comparison with GFS forecasts exposes significant advantage of the new system with high-resolution model simulations in forecasting the high-resolution mesoscale weather processes, such as land/sea breezes and upslope/downslope flows.

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