Mesoscale predictability of moist baroclinic waves: Experiments with parameterized convection

Recent papers by the authors demonstrated the possible influence of initial errors of small amplitude and scale on the numerical prediction of the surprise'' snowstorm of 24 - 25 January 2000. They found that initial errors grew rapidly at scales below 200 km, and that the rapid error growth was dependent on moist processes. In an attempt to generalize these results from a single case study, the present paper studies the error growth in an idealized baroclinic wave amplifying in a conditionally unstable atmosphere. The present results show that without the effects of moisture, there is little error growth in the short-term (0 - 36 h) forecast error ( starting from random noise), even though the basic jet used here produces a rapidly growing synoptic-scale disturbance. With the effect of moisture included, the error is characterized by upscale growth, basically as found by the authors in their study of the numerical prediction of the surprise snowstorm.

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Copyright 2004 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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Author Tan, Zhe-Min
Zhang, Fuqing
Rotunno, Richard
Snyder, Chris
Publisher UCAR/NCAR - Library
Publication Date 2004-07-01T00:00:00
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Topic Category geoscientificInformation
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Metadata Date 2023-08-18T19:05:33.010632
Metadata Record Identifier edu.ucar.opensky::articles:17408
Metadata Language eng; USA
Suggested Citation Tan, Zhe-Min, Zhang, Fuqing, Rotunno, Richard, Snyder, Chris. (2004). Mesoscale predictability of moist baroclinic waves: Experiments with parameterized convection. UCAR/NCAR - Library. http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7474c53. Accessed 25 June 2025.

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