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liubainian

银虫 (小有名气)

[交流] 气象学专业翻译

Statistical methods can provide probabilistic forecasts without the need for ensemble forecasts. The climatological
distribution has been mentioned previously; another example is a single deterministic forecast turned
into a probabilistic forecast by dressing it with a distribution of past forecast errors valid for the same region,
season and forecast range. However, such simple statistical methods will always yield the same spread. Some
flow-dependence could be introduced in the error statistics by stratifying the sample according to the predicted
atmospheric state but sample size is likely to be a major issue with this approach. In contrast, ensembles consisting
of multiple integrations of numerical weather prediction models do exhibit temporal and spatial variations
of the spread because the conditions of the flow itself modulate the dispersion of nearby atmospheric states.
The realism of the spread will depend on how well the sources of uncertainty are represented in the ensemble
prediction system. An example of the variability of the ensemble spread is given in (Fig. 3). It shows two
consecutive ensemble forecasts of hurricane Katrina’s track. Katrina, made landfall near New Orleans on 29
August 2005, 12 UTC. The ensemble forecast issued on 26 August, 00 UTC exhibit a large dispersion of tracks.
This dispersion is substantially reduced in the ensemble forecast initialised at 12 UTC on 26 August. The actual
track of Katrina was close to the mode of the distribution predicted by the later forecast.
Even for a perfect ensemble, one cannot expect a very high correlation between the ensemble mean error and the
spread if the correlation is computed from pairs of error and spread for individual cases because one essentially
compares the standard deviation of a distribution with the magnitude of individual realisations. The correlation
of spread and ensemble mean error for a perfect ensemble increases with the case-to-case variability of the
spread [25]. It is more appropriate to assess the validity of (7) by considering the sample mean RMS errors
conditioned on the predicted spread. Such a diagnostic was performed previously for the ECMWF EPS [26]. It
is repeated here using data from a more recent version of the operational ECMWF EPS. The data consists of 89
ensemble forecasts (Feb–April 2006) for 500 hPa geopotential height in the Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes
(35–65N). As the true state of the atmosphere is unavailable, the ensemble mean error is estimated from
analyses, i.e. estimates of the initial state obtained with ECMWF’s four-dimensional variational assimilation
system. For the considered variable and forecast ranges this is considered to be an acceptable approximation.
The data is analysed on a regular 2.5×2.5 latitude-longitude grid—2160 grid points in total. Thus the entire
sample consists of 192240 pairs of spread and ensemble mean error. The data has been stratified according to
the predicted spread and divided into 20 equally populated bins, where bin boundaries are given by the 5%-
,10%,. . . ,95%-percentiles of the spread distribution. Then, the RMS error of the ensemble mean and the RMS
spread are computed for each bin. Figure 4 shows the relationship between error and spread for the 2-day,
5-day and 10-day forecast. At all three forecast ranges, the ensemble spread contains useful information about
variations of the width of the distribution of the ensemble mean error. The larger the spread of the ensemble
the larger is the average ensemble mean RMS error. At the later forecast ranges (5–10 days), the average RMS
error is fairly accurately predicted by the ensemble standard deviations. At the shorter forecast ranges (2-days),
the spread is less reliable in predicting the variability of the width of the ensemble mean error distribution.
For cases with large (small) ensemble spread, the average RMS error is systematically lower (higher) than the
spread.
The comparison shown in Fig. 4 does not distinguish between temporal variations of the spread and spatial
variations. Some of the skill in predicting variations of the width of the forecast error distribution can arise
from correctly predicting the seasonally averaged geographic variations. We consider now the geopotential
normalised by the time-average RMS spread as new variable in order to focus on the aspect of the temporal
variability only. By definition, the time-averaged spread of the normalised geopotential is geographically
uniform. The relationship between spread and average RMS error for the normalised geopotential is shown
in Fig. 5. The normalisation reduces the range over which error and spread vary. For instance, the ratio of
RMS error in the bin with largest 5% spread to the RMS error in the bin with lowest 5% spread is about 4.5
without normalisation at day 5; this is reduced to about 2.7 with normalisation. With increasing forecast range,
the distribution of the predicted spread narrows. Eventually, as the ensemble converges to the climatological distribution, the spread will be almost constant except for sampling uncertainty and moderate intra-seasonal
variations. Figure 5 demonstrates that the EPS is indeed providing information about flow-dependent variations
of the width of the ensemble mean error distribution. At the same time, the diagram reveals systematic
errors of the flow-dependent error bars predicted by the ensemble. Both calibration as well as improvements
of the initial uncertainty representation and model uncertainty representation are expected to lead to significant
further improvements of the statistical consistency and thus increase the capability to predict flow-dependent
variations of forecast uncertainty.
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muchong88

金虫 (正式写手)

这个很难阿。
2楼2010-08-06 00:58:13
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