Initial conditions for convection-allowing ensembles over the conterminous United States

Five sets of 48-h, 10-member, convection-allowing ensemble (CAE) forecasts with 3-km horizontal grid spacing were systematically evaluated over the conterminous United States with a focus on precipitation across 31 cases. The various CAEs solely differed by their initial condition perturbations (ICPs) and central initial states. CAEs initially centered about deterministic Global Forecast System (GFS) analyses were unequivocally better than those initially centered about ensemble mean analyses produced by a limited-area single-physics, single-dynamics 15-km continuously cycling ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF), strongly suggesting relative superiority of the GFS analyses. Additionally, CAEs with flow-dependent ICPs derived from either the EnKF or multimodel 3-h forecasts from the Short-Range Ensemble Forecast (SREF) system had higher fractions skill scores than CAEs with randomly generated mesoscale ICPs. Conversely, due to insufficient spread, CAEs with EnKF ICPs had worse reliability, discrimination, and dispersion than those with random and SREF ICPs. However, members in theCAEwith SREF ICPs undesirably clustered by dynamic core represented in the ICPs, and CAEs with random ICPs had poor spinup characteristics. Collectively, these results indicate that continuously cycled EnKF mean analyses were suboptimal for CAE initialization purposes and suggest that further work to improve limited-area continuously cycling EnKFs over large regional domains is warranted. Additionally, the deleterious aspects of using both multimodel and random ICPs suggest efforts toward improving spread in CAEs with single-physics, single-dynamics, flow-dependent ICPs should continue.