Adaptive Kalman Filtering for Postprocessing Ensemble Numerical Weather Predictions

Anna Pelosi Department of Civil Engineering, University of Salerno, Fisciano (SA), Italy

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Hanoi Medina Department of Crop, Soil and Environmental Sciences, Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama

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Joris Van den Bergh Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium, Brussels, Belgium

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Stéphane Vannitsem Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium, Brussels, Belgium

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Giovanni Battista Chirico Department of Agricultural Sciences, Water Resources Management and Biosystems Engineering Division, University of Naples Federico II, Portici (NA), Italy

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Abstract

Forecasts from numerical weather prediction models suffer from systematic and nonsystematic errors, which originate from various sources such as subgrid-scale variability affecting large scales. Statistical postprocessing techniques can partly remove such errors. Adaptive MOS techniques based on Kalman filters (here called AMOS), are used to sequentially postprocess the forecasts, by continuously updating the correction parameters as new ground observations become available. These techniques, originally proposed for deterministic forecasts, are valuable when long training datasets do not exist. Here, a new adaptive postprocessing technique for ensemble predictions (called AEMOS) is introduced. The proposed method implements a Kalman filtering approach that fully exploits the information content of the ensemble for updating the parameters of the postprocessing equation. A verification study for the region of Campania in southern Italy is performed. Two years (2014–15) of daily meteorological observations of 10-m wind speed and 2-m temperature from 18 ground-based automatic weather stations are used, comparing them with the corresponding COSMO-LEPS ensemble forecasts. It is shown that the proposed adaptive method outperforms the AMOS method, while it shows comparable results to the member-by-member batch postprocessing approach.

© 2017 American Meteorological Society. For information regarding reuse of this content and general copyright information, consult the AMS Copyright Policy (www.ametsoc.org/PUBSReuseLicenses).

Corresponding author: Giovanni Battista Chirico, gchirico@unina.it

Abstract

Forecasts from numerical weather prediction models suffer from systematic and nonsystematic errors, which originate from various sources such as subgrid-scale variability affecting large scales. Statistical postprocessing techniques can partly remove such errors. Adaptive MOS techniques based on Kalman filters (here called AMOS), are used to sequentially postprocess the forecasts, by continuously updating the correction parameters as new ground observations become available. These techniques, originally proposed for deterministic forecasts, are valuable when long training datasets do not exist. Here, a new adaptive postprocessing technique for ensemble predictions (called AEMOS) is introduced. The proposed method implements a Kalman filtering approach that fully exploits the information content of the ensemble for updating the parameters of the postprocessing equation. A verification study for the region of Campania in southern Italy is performed. Two years (2014–15) of daily meteorological observations of 10-m wind speed and 2-m temperature from 18 ground-based automatic weather stations are used, comparing them with the corresponding COSMO-LEPS ensemble forecasts. It is shown that the proposed adaptive method outperforms the AMOS method, while it shows comparable results to the member-by-member batch postprocessing approach.

© 2017 American Meteorological Society. For information regarding reuse of this content and general copyright information, consult the AMS Copyright Policy (www.ametsoc.org/PUBSReuseLicenses).

Corresponding author: Giovanni Battista Chirico, gchirico@unina.it
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