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Introduction

Meteorological evaluation of the OpenIFS outputs is demonstrated here on case studies. Two weather events have been chosen in order to show the model's capabilities on the one hand, and on the other hand, to provide reference cases for the users (to compare the results of their installed model version with the ones run at the ECMWF or to inter-compare the results of different model versions). Important aspects at selection of the cases were their geographical scope and their physical background, i.e., those storm events were preferred which had severe impact over Europe and were governed by large-scale dynamical forces. Cases both with weak and good operational forecast skill were considered.


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Case studies

Storm Xaver

On the 5 December 2013 a large and violent cyclonic storm hit the North Sea region and several adjacent countries. Problems were caused both by the high wind speeds and the related storm surge. The surge reached 6 metres in Hamburg for example and was the highest along the England east-coast for 60 years. In the aftermaths of the cyclone a blizzard hit Sweden. The storm system was named Xaver by Berlin's Free University; other names assigned elsewhere include Bodil, Sven and St. Nicholas (Hewson et al., 2014). T he cyclone developed around 00 UTC on 4 December northeast of Newfoundland and it was situated between converging northerly and southerly airstreams. Due to the westerly wind jet accelerated by the convergence, the cyclone moved to northeast and east, deepening explosively. It had an intense meso-vortex hanging back to west, which enhanced the strong wind (see Figure 1 ). The cyclone was presented in the operational forecasts 8-9 days before the event and the forecasts indicated the very strong wind gust 3-4 days in advance. (Although some strength overestimation over Germany as well as timing error in surface pressure were concluded.)

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Figure 1: 24-hour maximum wind gust (m/s) on 5 December with mean sea level pressure (white contours; hPa) on 12 UTC on 5 December from the operational forecasts at 00 UTC on 3 (left) and 5 December (middle) and from the observations (right).

Storm Desmond

Storm Desmond caused severe flooding, travel disruption and a power outage across northern England, parts of Scotland and Ireland on 5 December 2015. Cumbria in northwestern part of England is one of the worst affected regions with more than 200 mm of rain in 24 hours recorded in that area. Storm Desmond broke the United Kingdom's 24-hour rainfall record, with 341.4 mm of rain falling in Honister Pass, Cumbria. On Saturday, 5 December, UK Met office issued a red warning of heavy rain for Cumbria. The cyclone also led to flooding in southern Norway.

Orographical enhancement of precipitation played a major role in the event and the operational model of the ECMWF picked well the highest rainfall amounts over the orographical barriers. However, the forecast underestimated the peak values of about 100 mm in 24 hours in Cumbria and overestimated the precipitation amount in lee of the hills ( Figure 2 ).

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Figure 2: 24-hour precipitation amount (mm) between 6 UTC on 5 December and 6 UTC on 6 December, based on ECMWF operational IFS forecast at 00 UTC on 5 December (left, with cyan contours for the mean sea level pressure at 12 UTC on 5 December) and observations (right).

Model experiments

Several experiments have been conducted with OpenIFS for both cases with the aim to test the effect of starting date and forecast length, initial condition as well as spatial resolution to the forecast quality. The details of experiments are summarized in Table 1 .


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Table 1:  Settings of the experiments achieved for Storm Xaver and Storm Desmond.



Experiment IDInitial conditionResolutionStarting dateTime stepOutput frequency
Xaver
1.
ERA-InterimT255L911 Dec 20132700 s3h
2.
ERA_InterimT639L137
900 s3h
3.
ERA5T255L91
2700 s3h
4.
ERA5T639L137
900 s3h
Desmond
1.grygERA-InterimT255L91

1 Dec 2015; 2 Dec 2015;
3 Dec 2015; 4 Dec 2015; 5 Dec 2015

2700 s3h
2.gs22ERA-InterimT639L137

3 Dec 2015; 4 Dec 2015  

900 s3h
3.gs23ERA-InterimT1279L1373 Dec 2015; 4 Dec 2015600 s3h
4.gs0cERA5T255L91

3 Dec 2015; 4 Dec 2015

2700 s3h
5.gs04ERA5T639L137

3 Dec 2015; 4 Dec 2015

900 s3h

- download from download.ecmwf.int/openifs/evalution

Post-processing

- how to prepare data for plotting

Metview macros

- where they are, how to set them up .. etc


Catalogue


References

Hewson, T. , Magnusson, L. , Breivik, O. , Prates, F ., Tsonevsky, I. , de Vries, H.J.W. , 2014: Windstorms in northwest Europe in late 2013. ECMWF Newsletter 139, 22–28. [ PDF ]

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