Evaluating the skill of NMME seasonal precipitation ensemble predictions for 17 hydroclimatic regions in continental China

Abstract

There is an increasing focus on the usefulness of climate model–based seasonal precipitation forecasts as inputs for hydrological applications. This study reveals that most models from the North American Multi-Model Ensemble (NMME) have potential to forecast seasonal precipitation over 17 hydroclimatic regions in continental China. In this paper, we evaluated the NMME precipitation forecast against observations. The evaluation indices included the correlation coefficient (R), relative root-mean-square error (RRMSE), rank histogram (RH), and continuous ranked probability skill score (CRPSS). We presented the RRMSE-R diagram to distinguish differences between the performances of individual models. We find that the predictive skill is seasonally and regionally dependent, exhibiting higher values in autumn and spring and lower values in summer. Higher predictive skill is observed over most regions except the southeastern monsoon regions, which may be attributable to local climatology and variability. Among the 11 NMME models, CFS, especially CFSv2, exhibits the best predictive skill. The GFDL and NASA models, which are followed by CMC, perform worse than CFS. The performances of IRI and CCSM3 are relatively worse than that of the other models. The forecast skills are significantly improved in multi-model mean forecasts based on simple model averaging (SMA). The improvement is more obvious for Bayesian model averaging (BMA), which is employed to further improve the forecast skill and address model uncertainty using multiple model outputs, than individual model and SMA.