Improving S2S precipitation forecasts in UFS through Tropical Nudging
and Explainable Machine Learning
Abstract
Due to the coupled nature of the earth system, precipitation forecast
errors at S2S lead times are caused by a combination of errors/biases
from the atmosphere, ocean, ice and land across a range of spatial and
temporal scales. We show that UFS precipitation errors over the U.S. at
Weeks 3-4 can be directly related to biases in simulating tropical
dynamics. In particular, the inability of the UFS to realistically
simulate the Madden-Julian oscillation (MJO) leads to biases in the
teleconnection to North America that produces these errors. When the
tropics are nudged to produce an accurate representation of the MJO and
other tropical disturbances, U.S. West Coast precipitation biases are
substantially reduced. A clustering analysis is used to show that the
greatest forecast improvements with nudging occur during warm ENSO
events when MJO convection is in the Indian Ocean and about to move into
the Maritime Continent. Physical mechanisms that explain the improvement
in tropical-extratropical teleconnections during certain MJO and ENSO
states will be discussed. We will also present future plans to combine
state-of-the-art developments in machine learning with process-based
diagnostics of the tropical moisture and moist static energy (MSE)
budgets to understand and correct precipitation biases in coupled UFS
hindcasts. In particular, we will discuss how model biases and errors in
tropical variability (e.g. MJO) and associated teleconnections to
midlatitudes lead to errors in U.S. precipitation on S2S timescales, and
present methods to reduce these errors via post-processing on a
forecast-by-forecast basis.