IMPACTOFTAMDARONTHERUCMODELALOOKINTO.pptVIP

IMPACT OF TAMDAR ON THE RUC MODEL: A LOOK INTO SOME OF THE STATISTICS WITH CASE STUDIES Overview The main issue: Objective evaluation (statistics) of relative humidity (RH) has occasionally shown poorer performance for RUC runs with TAMDAR Statistics - calculated by comparing RUC forecasts with and without TAMDAR to RAOBs at the standard pressure levels (850, 700, 500 mb) Is this really worse performance with TAMDAR OR are there other reasons for the poorer scores? Procedure: Find days that stand out with poorer scores Examine individual RAOBs with forecast soundings to see where the errors occur Concentrate on the Great Lakes subset (13 RAOBs) What this all means... RH often varies strongly in the vertical as shown in RAOB profiles Calculating error statistics only at the mandatory levels makes them more vulnerable to unrepresentativeness It can only take 1 or 2 bad RAOB comparisons (out of 13 in the Great Lakes area) to yield a large RMS error With only mandatory levels being used, slight shifts of the RH in the vertical can be severely penalized The RAOBs often have some very sharp RH variations in the vertical that may or may not be real and can result in huge errors if they fall at a mandatory level Additionally, it is unrealistic to expect the RUC model to resolve some of these fluctuations (if they are indeed real) Considering the above reasoning, we decided to change the verification to a layer method Calculations made at 10-mb intervals Summary We began the study as a forensic pathology study to try to better understand why the RMS RH scores were substantially worse for the RUC runs with TAMDAR on some days Used the Great Lakes area with 13 RAOB/forecast comparisons Focused on 3-h and 6-h forecasts valid at 0000 UTC since TAMDAR data in abundance for these initialization times Discovered issues with the mandatory-only scoring method Change to a layer average method have produced more representative