The Regional Spectral Model Performance over the South America during the Niño Year (1997/1998)

During the last four years (1996-1999) the University of Chile has directed significant research towards the implementation and evaluation of a version of the Regional Spectral Model/NCEP in order to support operational Chilean weather forecasting. This implementation is designed to provide traditional synoptic forecasts at high resolution grid spacing for optimum solving of the Andes mountain forcing. The model implementation has been running on a AlphaServer workstation and sending real-time output to the forecasters and meteorologists in Chile and Argentina from 1996, using the Web pages.

http://dgf.uchile.cl/~jvergara/chile.html

This paper explores the performance of the model along the El Niño year of 1997/1998. During this year the RSM was run operationally (almost every day) and several cases of strong weather condition over Chile will be show in this work. The model demonstrated the operational capability to run successfully, over South America (in particular Chile) and simulated the strong events, especially along the El Niño event of 1997/1998. The model proved to be an effective tool for support the weather forecasts over of Chile.