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.

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.

Several OpenIFS experiments have been conducted for this case 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.

Table 1:

- model setup: dates / resolutions / erai & era5 / run length

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

Storm Xavier

same

Post-processing step

- how to prepare data for plotting

- precipitation.

Metview macros

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

Catalogue