Dr. Vellinga presented a seminar titled “The impact for tropical storm forecasts of upgrades to UK Met Office prediction systems”.
Resumen
The past two years have seen various upgrades to the UK Met Office’s operational prediction systems, including a near-doubling of horizontal resolution in the global deterministic forecast model to 10 x 12km. I will discuss the implications of these improvements for tropical storm predictions, as well as further benefits from planned upgrades that are currently being tested. The biggest change will see a move towards a fully coupled atmosphere-ocean model for our global deterministic forecast by 2021. We have tested this coupled configuration in hindcast mode from May 2016-July 2017 and in near-real time forecast mode from July 2017-present. Verification has identified several benefits for tropical storm predictions from interactive ocean-atmosphere coupling and we are currently analyzing these results. We have also identified a potential issue with over-predicting the cold SST wake. Other recent developments at the Met Office include real-time forecasts with convection-permitting regional models in the tropics; and the successful prediction of the very active 2017 Atlantic season by the seasonal forecast model Glosea5 from as early as May 2017.
A recording of the presentation is available on the anonymous ftp site: ftp://ftp.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/pub/blog/seminars/2018/Vellinga_HRD_seminar_20180312.mp4
