Verification of Eta–RSM Short-Range Ensemble Forecasts

Abstract Motivated by the success of ensemble forecasting at the medium range, the performance of a prototype short-range ensemble forecast system is examined. The ensemble dataset consists of 15 case days from September 1995 through January 1996. There are 15 members of the ensemble, 10 from an 80-km version of the eta model and five from the regional spectral model. Initial conditions include various in-house analyses available at the National Centers for Environmental Prediction as well as bred initial conditions interpolated from the medium-range forecast ensemble. Forecasts from the 29-km mesoeta model were archived as well for comparison. The performance of the ensemble is first evaluated by the criterion of “uniformity of verification rank.” Assuming a perfect forecast model, equally plausible initial conditions, and the verification is a plausible member of the ensemble, these imply the verification when pooled with the 15 ensemble forecasts and sorted is equally likely to occur in each of the 16 ...

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