TY - GEN
AU - L. Magnusson
AU - A.J. Thorpe
AU - Massimo Bonavita
AU - S.T.K. Lang
AU - A. McNally
AU - Nils Wedi
AB - On 30th October 2012 hurricane Sandy made landfall on the U.S east coast with a devastating impact. In this report we evaluate the forecast performance from the ECMWF HRES and ENS forecasts together with ensemble forecasts from other NWP centres, available from the TIGGE archive. The results show that the ECMWF forecasts predicted the landfall 7-8 days in advance. We investigate the impact of the warm SST anomaly outside the U.S east coast by running sensitivity experiments with climatological SST instead of persisting the SST anomaly from the analysis. We find that the SST anomaly does not affect Sandy's track in the forecast. However, the forecasts initialised with the warm SST anomaly feature a more intense system. Furthermore we investigate the role of spatial resolution by comparing 4 different model runs, spanning from T3999 (5 km) to T159 (150 km) resolution. While all runs predict Sandy's landfall, at very high resolution the tropical cyclone structure and the the oceanic wave forecast is greatly improved. Finally we investigate the impact of omitting data from polar orbiting satellites on the ensemble forecasts, and find that the data has an impact on the ensemble forecasts, although even without the data some ensemble members correctly predict Sandy's landfall.
BT - ECMWF Technical Memoranda
DA - 04/2013
DO - 10.21957/b5nhw6qe1
LA - eng
M1 - 699
N2 - On 30th October 2012 hurricane Sandy made landfall on the U.S east coast with a devastating impact. In this report we evaluate the forecast performance from the ECMWF HRES and ENS forecasts together with ensemble forecasts from other NWP centres, available from the TIGGE archive. The results show that the ECMWF forecasts predicted the landfall 7-8 days in advance. We investigate the impact of the warm SST anomaly outside the U.S east coast by running sensitivity experiments with climatological SST instead of persisting the SST anomaly from the analysis. We find that the SST anomaly does not affect Sandy's track in the forecast. However, the forecasts initialised with the warm SST anomaly feature a more intense system. Furthermore we investigate the role of spatial resolution by comparing 4 different model runs, spanning from T3999 (5 km) to T159 (150 km) resolution. While all runs predict Sandy's landfall, at very high resolution the tropical cyclone structure and the the oceanic wave forecast is greatly improved. Finally we investigate the impact of omitting data from polar orbiting satellites on the ensemble forecasts, and find that the data has an impact on the ensemble forecasts, although even without the data some ensemble members correctly predict Sandy's landfall.
PB - ECMWF
PY - 2013
EP - 28
T2 - ECMWF Technical Memoranda
TI - Evaluation of forecasts for hurricane Sandy
UR - https://www.ecmwf.int/node/10913
ER -