A comparison of WRF forecasts made using differing sources for initial and boundary conditions

In South Florida, mesoscale weather features have a significant impact on day to day weather forecasts as they represent the primary forcing. In addition, sea-surface temperatures have an impact on the development of the sea-breeze circulation. Small scale weather features are not represented properly in the guidance from the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) and therefore high resolution diagnostic as well as prognostic tools are necessary to support local forecasts. Also, sea-surface temperature fields in NCEP analyses are at a coarse resolution relative to mesoscale weather features.

The advent of the ARPS Data Analysis System (ADAS) at National Weather Service Weather Forecast Offices (WFO) has provided the ability to ingest local data sets into locally controlled high resolution diagnostic analyses that capture and represent better some of these features. In addition, new retrieval algorithms allow for sea surface temperature fields at a higher resolution than NCEP analyses provide.

Preliminary results of a study focusing on the impact of using high resolution sea-surface temperature data as boundary conditions for a locally run mesoscale model and using the enhanced ADAS diagnostic analyses to initialize that model, the WRF model, will be presented. ADAS analyses produced at WFO Melbourne are used to initialize a 4km resolution run of the WRF model, which is run for WFO Miami. Comparisons of model output with surface observations will be presented.