An inter-comparison performance assessment of a Brazilian global sub-seasonal prediction model against four sub-seasonal to seasonal (S2S) prediction project models

Guimaraes, B. d. S., Coelho, C. A. d. S., Woolnough, S. J. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0500-8514, Kubota, P. Y., Bastarz, C. F., Figueroa, S. N., Bonatti, J. P. and de Souza, D. C. (2021) An inter-comparison performance assessment of a Brazilian global sub-seasonal prediction model against four sub-seasonal to seasonal (S2S) prediction project models. Climate Dynamics, 56. pp. 2359-2375. ISSN 0930-7575 doi: 10.1007/s00382-020-05589-5

Abstract/Summary

This paper presents an inter-comparison performance assessment of the newly developed Centre for Weather Forecast and Climate Studies (CPTEC) model (the Brazilian Atmospheric Model version 1.2, BAM-1.2) against four Sub-seasonal to Seasonal (S2S) prediction project models from: Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA), Environmental and Climate Change Canada (ECCC), European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BoM). The inter-comparison was performed using hindcasts of weekly precipitation anomalies and the daily evolution of Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) for 12 extended austral summers (November–March, 1999/2000– 2010/2011), leading to a verification sample of 120 hindcasts. The deterministic assessment of the prediction of precipitation anomalies revealed ECMWF as the model presenting the highest (smallest) correlation (root mean squared error, RMSE) values among all examined models. JMA ranked as the second best performing model, followed by ECCC, CPTEC and BoM. The probabilistic assessment for the event "positive precipitation anomaly" revealed that ECMWF presented better discrimination, reliability and resolution when compared to CPTEC and BoM. However, these three models produced overconfident probabilistic predictions. For MJO predictions, CPTEC crosses the 0.5 bivariate correlation threshold at around 19 days when using the mean of 4 ensemble members, presenting similar performance to BoM, JMA and ECCC. Overall, CPTEC proved to be competitive compared to the S2S models investigated, but with respect to ECMWF there is scope to improve the prediction system, likely by a combination of including coupling to an interactive ocean, improving resolution and model parameterization schemes, and better methods for ensemble generation.

Additional Information	Bruno Guimaraes was a visiting PhD student when this work was carried out. I'm not sure whether he should be entered as a PhD student or not. As a visiting student he was paying fees at half rate.
Item Type	Article
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/95128
Identification Number/DOI	10.1007/s00382-020-05589-5
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	Science > School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences > NCAS Science > School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences > Department of Meteorology
Additional Information	Bruno Guimaraes was a visiting PhD student when this work was carried out. I'm not sure whether he should be entered as a PhD student or not. As a visiting student he was paying fees at half rate.
Publisher	Springer
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