Joint Medium-Range Ensembles from The Met. Office and ECMWF Systems

Abstract

One possible method of incorporating model sensitivities into ensemble forecasting systems is to combine ensembles run from two or more models. Furthermore, the use of more than one analysis, to which perturbations are added, may provide further unstable directions for error growth not present with a single analysis. Results are presented from recent investigations into the potential benefit of combining ensembles from the systems of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts and The Met. Office of the United Kingdom. The multimodel and multianalysis ensemble significantly outperforms either individual system in many performance aspects, including deterministic and probabilistic forecast skill, spread–skill correlations, and breadth of synoptic information. It is demonstrated that these improvements are achieved through the combination of independent, useful information contained in the individual systems, and not through simple cancellation of biases that could occur when ensembles from two different forecast systems are combined. In addition, results indicate that model dependencies are at least comparable with analysis dependencies on medium-range timescales, and so in general both models and both analyses are required in the joint ensemble for the largest benefits.