A New Objective Technique for Verifying Mesoscale Numerical Weather Prediction Models

This report presents a new objective technique to verify predictions of the sea-breeze phenomenon over east-central Florida by the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (RAMS) mesoscale numerical weather prediction (NWP) model. The Contour Error Map (CEM) technique identifies sea-breeze transition times in objectively-analyzed grids of observed and forecast wind, verifies the forecast sea-breeze transition times against the observed times, and computes the mean post-sea breeze wind direction and speed to compare the observed and forecast winds behind the sea-breeze front. The CEM technique is superior to traditional objective verification techniques and previously-used subjective verification methodologies because: It is automated, requiring little manual intervention, It accounts for both spatial and temporal scales and variations, It accurately identifies and verifies the sea-breeze transition times, and It provides verification contour maps and simple statistical parameters for easy interpretation. The CEM uses a parallel lowpass boxcar filter and a high-order bandpass filter to identify the sea-breeze transition times in the observed and model grid points. Once the transition times are identified, CEM fits a Gaussian histogram function to the actual histogram of transition time differences between the model and observations. The fitted parameters of the Gaussian function subsequently explain the timing bias and variance of the timing differences across the valid comparison domain. Once the transition times are all identified at each grid point, the CEM computes the mean wind direction and speed during the remainder of the day for all times and grid points after the sea-breeze transition time. The CEM technique performed quite well when compared to independent meteorological assessments of the sea-breeze transition times and results from a previously published subjective evaluation. The algorithm correctly identified a forecast or observed sea-breeze occurrence or absence 93% of the time during the two- month evaluation period from July and August 2000. Nearly all failures in CEM were the result of complex precipitation features (observed or forecast) that contaminated the wind field, resulting in a false identification of a sea-breeze transition. A qualitative comparison between the CEM timing errors and the subjectively determined observed and forecast transition times indicate that the algorithm performed very well overall. Most discrepancies between the CEM results and the subjective analysis were again caused by observed or forecast areas of precipitation that led to complex wind patterns. The CEM also failed on a day when the observed sea- breeze transition affected only a very small portion of the verification domain. Based on the results of CEM, the RAMS tended to predict the onset and movement of the sea-breeze transition too early and/or quickly. The domain-wide timing biases provided by CEM indicated an early bias on 30 out of 37 days when both an observed and forecast sea breeze occurred over the same portions of the analysis domain. These results are consistent with previous subjective verifications of the RAMS sea breeze predictions. A comparison of the mean post-sea breeze winds indicate that RAMS has a positive wind-speed bias for .all days, which is also consistent with the early bias in the sea-breeze transition time since the higher wind speeds resulted in a faster inland penetration of the sea breeze compared to reality.