U.S. flag An official website of the United States government.
Official websites use .gov

A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS

A lock ( ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

i

Proactive QC: A Fully Flow-Dependent Quality Control Scheme Based on EFSO



Details

  • Journal Title:
    Monthly Weather Review
  • Personal Author:
  • NOAA Program & Office:
  • Description:
    Despite dramatic improvements over the last decades, operational NWP forecasts still occasionally suffer from abrupt drops in their forecast skill. Such forecast skill “dropouts” may occur even in a perfect NWP system because of the stochastic nature of NWP but can also result from flaws in the NWP system. Recent studies have shown that dropouts occur due not to a model’s deficiencies but to misspecified initial conditions, suggesting that they could be mitigated by improving the quality control (QC) system so that the observation-minus-background (O-B) innovations that would degrade a forecast can be detected and rejected. The ensemble forecast sensitivity to observations (EFSO) technique enables for the quantification of how much each observation has improved or degraded the forecast. A recent study has shown that 24-h EFSO can detect detrimental O-B innovations that caused regional forecast skill dropouts and that the forecast can be improved by not assimilating them. Inspired by that success, a new QC method is proposed, termed proactive QC (PQC), that detects detrimental innovations 6 h after the analysis using EFSO and then repeats the analysis and forecast without using them. PQC is implemented and tested on a lower-resolution version of NCEP’s operational global NWP system. It is shown that EFSO is insensitive to the choice of verification and lead time (24 or 6 h) and that PQC likely improves the analysis, as attested to by forecast improvements of up to 5 days and beyond. Strategies for reducing the computational costs and further optimizing the observation rejection criteria are also discussed.
  • Keywords:
  • Source:
    Monthly Weather Review, 145(8), 3331-3354
  • DOI:
  • ISSN:
    0027-0644 ; 1520-0493
  • Format:
  • Publisher:
  • Document Type:
  • Funding:
  • Rights Information:
    Other
  • Compliance:
    Library
  • Main Document Checksum:
    urn:sha256:d83adf6401b33bb72e55d95feda69270a9974288733c1ac87961963deda8f504
  • Download URL:
  • File Type:
    Filetype[PDF - 4.13 MB ]
ON THIS PAGE

The NOAA IR serves as an archival repository of NOAA-published products including scientific findings, journal articles, guidelines, recommendations, or other information authored or co-authored by NOAA or funded partners. As a repository, the NOAA IR retains documents in their original published format to ensure public access to scientific information.