Atmospheric water vapour transport in ACCESS-S2 and the potential for enhancing skill of subseasonal forecasts of precipitation

Article

Reid, Kimberley J., Hudson, Debra, King, Andrew D., Lane, Todd P. and Marshall, Andrew G.. 2024. "Atmospheric water vapour transport in ACCESS-S2 and the potential for enhancing skill of subseasonal forecasts of precipitation." Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society. 150 (758), pp. 68-80. https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.4585
Article Title

Atmospheric water vapour transport in ACCESS-S2 and the potential for enhancing skill of subseasonal forecasts of precipitation

ERA Journal ID1987
Article CategoryArticle
AuthorsReid, Kimberley J., Hudson, Debra, King, Andrew D., Lane, Todd P. and Marshall, Andrew G.
Journal TitleQuarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society
Journal Citation150 (758), pp. 68-80
Number of Pages13
Year2024
PublisherJohn Wiley & Sons
Place of PublicationUnited Kingdom
ISSN0035-9009
1477-870X
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.4585
Web Address (URL)https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/qj.4585
AbstractExtended warning of above-average and extreme precipitation is valuable to a wide range of stakeholders. However, the sporadic nature of precipitation makes it difficult to forecast skilfully beyond one week. Subseasonal forecasting is a growing area of science that aims to predict average weather conditions multiple weeks in advance using dynamical models. Building on recent work in this area, we test the hypothesis that using large-scale horizontal moisture transport as a predictor for precipitation may increase the forecast skill of the above-median and high-precipitation weeks on subseasonal time-scales. We analysed retrospective forecast (hindcast) sets from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology's latest operational subseasonal-to-seasonal forecasting model, ACCESS-S2, to compare the forecast skill of precipitation using integrated water vapour transport (IVT) as a proxy, compared to using precipitation forecasts directly. We show that ACCESS-S2 precipitation generally produces more skilful forecasts, except over some regions where IVT could be a useful additional diagnostic for warning of heavy precipitation events.
Keywordsapplication/context; subseasonal; atmosphere; forecasting (methods); tools and methods; rainfall; physical phenomenon; subseasonal prediction; synoptic
ANZSRC Field of Research 2020370105. Atmospheric dynamics
Byline AffiliationsAustralian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes, Australia
University of Melbourne
Monash University
Australian Bureau of Meteorology
Centre for Applied Climate Sciences
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