Downscaled North American Multi-Model Ensemble Forecast for the Pacific Northwest USA

Downscaled North American Multi-Model Ensemble Forecast of Meteorological Variables for the Pacific Northwest

Monthly retrospective hindcasts (1982-2010) and forecasts (2011-2020) of temperature and precipitation are acquired for the Pacific Northwest region of the United States from five models (CFSv2, NASA GEOS5v2, CanCM4i, GEM-NEMO, and NCAR-CCSM) participating in the North American Multi-Model Ensemble project (Kirtman et al., 2014). These models, detailed in Table 1 with more recent information available in (Becker et al., 2022), are initialized monthly to provide a forecast of 0-9 months at a 1.0̊ × 1.0̊ spatial resolution. The multi-model ensemble mean (ENSMEAN) is then generated for each initialization by simply averaging all considered models and their ensemble members. Monthly ENSMEAN forecast is bias-corrected and spatially downscaled to 1/24th degree using the methodology described in Wood et al. (2002) and Barbero et al. (2017) using historical meteorological data (gridMET; Abatzoglou, 2013) as the baseline. Then, the downscaled ENSMEAN data are temporally disaggregated to daily timescales using an analog approach. The closest analog month for the ENSMEAN forecast is found from the gridMET dataset by minimizing the root mean square error (RMSE) of monthly gridMET and forecast precipitation (excluding gridMET data for the target month). Other daily meteorological variables (such as maximum and minimum temperature, maximum and minimum relative humidity, wind speed, and specific humidity) are extracted from the same analog month to use as input for the coupled crop-hydrology model. As a last step to the analog approach, the process corrects the bias between the forecast and analog month to ensure that monthly mean temperature and accumulated precipitation match those of the original forecast. 

Table 1. List of NMME models used to create Ensemble Mean.

Model 
Model Expansion 
Ensemble Size 
References

NCEP- CFSv2 
Climate Forecast System, version 2 
24 
(Saha et al., 2014)

NASA GEOS5v2
Goddard Earth Observing System, version 5 
4
(Molod et al., 2020)

CanCM4i 
Fourth Generation Canadian Coupled Global Climate Model 
10 
(Merryfield et al., 2013)

GEM - NEMO 
Global Environmental Multiscale Model – Nucleus for European Modelling of the Ocean 
10 
(Lin et al., 2020)

NCAR - CCSM 
Community Climate System Model 
10 
(Kirtman & Min, 2009)

The dataset has *.mat files which are MATLAB data files. 

References

Abatzoglou, J. T. (2013). Development of gridded surface meteorological data for ecological applications and modelling. International Journal of Climatology, 33(1), 121–131. https://doi.org/10.1002/joc.3413

Barbero, R., Abatzoglou, J. T., & Hegewisch, K. C. (2017). Evaluation of Statistical Downscaling of North American Multimodel Ensemble Forecasts over the Western United States. Weather and Forecasting, 32(1), 327–341. https://doi.org/10.1175/WAF-D-16-0117.1

Becker, E. J., Kirtman, B. P., L’Heureux, M., Muñoz, Á. G., & Pegion, K. (2022). A Decade of the North American Multimodel Ensemble (NMME): Research, Application, and Future Directions. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 103(3), E973–E995. https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-20-0327.1

Kirtman, B. P., & Min, D. (2009). Multimodel Ensemble ENSO Prediction with CCSM and CFS. Monthly Weather Review, 137(9), 2908–2930. https://doi.org/10.1175/2009MWR2672.1

Kirtman, B. P., Min, D., Infanti, J. M., Kinter, J. L., Paolino, D. A., Zhang, Q., Dool, H. van den, Saha, S., Mendez, M. P., Becker, E., Peng, P., Tripp, P., Huang, J., DeWitt, D. G., Tippett, M. K., Barnston, A. G., Li, S., Rosati, A., Schubert, S. D., … Wood, E. F. (2014). The North American Multimodel Ensemble: Phase-1 Seasonal-to-Interannual Prediction; Phase-2 toward Developing Intraseasonal Prediction. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 95(4), 585–601. https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-12-00050.1

Lin, H., Merryfield, W. J., Muncaster, R., Smith, G. C., Markovic, M., Dupont, F., Roy, F., Lemieux, J.-F., Dirkson, A., Kharin, V. V., Lee, W.-S., Charron, M., & Erfani, A. (2020). The Canadian Seasonal to Interannual Prediction System Version 2 (CanSIPSv2). Weather and Forecasting, 35(4), 1317–1343. https://doi.org/10.1175/WAF-D-19-0259.1

Merryfield, W. J., Lee, W.-S., Boer, G. J., Kharin, V. V., Scinocca, J. F., Flato, G. M., Ajayamohan, R. S., Fyfe, J. C., Tang, Y., & Polavarapu, S. (2013). The Canadian Seasonal to Interannual Prediction System. Part I: Models and Initialization. Monthly Weather Review, 141(8), 2910–2945. https://doi.org/10.1175/MWR-D-12-00216.1

Molod, A., Hackert, E., Vikhliaev, Y., Zhao, B., Barahona, D., Vernieres, G., Borovikov, A., Kovach, R. M., Marshak, J., Schubert, S., Li, Z., Lim, Y.-K., Andrews, L. C., Cullather, R., Koster, R., Achuthavarier, D., Carton, J., Coy, L., Friere, J. L. M., … Pawson, S. (2020). GEOS-S2S Version 2: The GMAO High-Resolution Coupled Model and Assimilation System for Seasonal Prediction. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 125(5), e2019JD031767. https://doi.org/10.1029/2019JD031767

Saha, S., Moorthi, S., Wu, X., Wang, J., Nadiga, S., Tripp, P., Behringer, D., Hou, Y.-T., Chuang, H., Iredell, M., Ek, M., Meng, J., Yang, R., Mendez, M. P., Dool, H. van den, Zhang, Q., Wang, W., Chen, M., & Becker, E. (2014). The NCEP Climate Forecast System Version 2. Journal of Climate, 27(6), 2185–2208. https://doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-12-00823.1

Wood, A. W., Maurer, E. P., Kumar, A., & Lettenmaier, D. P. (2002). Long-range experimental hydrologic forecasting for the eastern United States. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, 107(D20), ACL 6-1-ACL 6-15. https://doi.org/10.1029/2001JD000659