Identification

Title

Convection-permitting forecasts initialized with continuously cycling limited-area 3DVAR, ensemble Kalman filter, and "hybrid" variational-ensemble data assimilation systems

Abstract

Analyses with 20-km horizontal grid spacing were produced from parallel continuously cycling three-dimensional variational (3DVAR), ensemble square root Kalman filter (EnSRF), and “hybrid” variational–ensemble data assimilation (DA) systems between 0000 UTC 6 May and 0000 UTC 21 June 2011 over a domain spanning the contiguous United States. Beginning 9 May, the 0000 UTC analyses initialized 36-h Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF) forecasts containing a large convection-permitting 4-km nest. These 4-km 3DVAR-, EnSRF-, and hybrid-initialized forecasts were compared to benchmark WRF forecasts initialized by interpolating 0000 UTC Global Forecast System (GFS) analyses onto the computational domain. While important differences regarding mean state characteristics of the 20-km DA systems were noted, verification efforts focused on the 4-km precipitation forecasts. The 3DVAR-, hybrid-, and EnSRF-initialized 4-km precipitation forecasts performed similarly regarding general precipitation characteristics, such as timing of the diurnal cycle, and all three forecast sets had high precipitation biases at heavier rainfall rates. However, meaningful differences emerged regarding precipitation placement as quantified by the fractions skill score. For most forecast hours, the hybrid-initialized 4-km precipitation forecasts were better than the EnSRF-, 3DVAR-, and GFS-initialized forecasts, and the improvement was often statistically significant at the 95th percentile. These results demonstrate the potential of limited-area continuously cycling hybrid DA configurations and suggest additional hybrid development is warranted.

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document

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http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d72z16f3

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Dataset language

eng

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geoscientificInformation

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title

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reference date

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publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

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publication

effective date

2014-02-01T00:00:00Z

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Copyright 2014 American Meteorological Society (AMS). Permission to use figures, tables, and brief excerpts from this work in scientific and educational works is hereby granted provided that the source is acknowledged. Any use of material in this work that is determined to be "fair use" under Section 107 or that satisfies the conditions specified in Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law (17 USC, as revised by P.L. 94-553) does not require the Society's permission. Republication, systematic reproduction, posting in electronic form on servers, or other uses of this material, except as exempted by the above statements, requires written permission or license from the AMS. Additional details are provided in the AMS Copyright Policies, available from the AMS at 617-227-2425 or amspubs@ametsoc.org. Permission to place a copy of this work on this server has been provided by the AMS. The AMS does not guarantee that the copy provided here is an accurate copy of the published work.

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None

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contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

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pointOfContact

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