Improving Short-Term, Near-Surface Temperature Forecasts by Integrating Weather Pattern Information into Model Output Statistics

Abstract

Abstract Dynamical numerical weather prediction has remarkably improved over the last decades. Yet postprocessing techniques are needed to calibrate forecasts which are based on statistical and machine learning techniques. With recent advances in the derivation of year-round, large-scale atmospheric circulations, or weather regimes, the question arises of whether this information can be valuable within forecast postprocessing methods. This paper investigates this by proposing a bias correction scheme to integrate the atmospheric circulation state derived from empirical orthogonal functions, referred to as weather patterns, for deterministic short-term, near-surface temperature forecasts based on least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) regression. We propose a computational study which first evaluates different weather pattern definitions (spatial domain) to improve temperature forecasts in Europe. As a bias could be associated with the weather pattern at the model initialization time or at the realization time of the forecast, both variants are tested in this study. We show that forecasted weather patterns with the identical spatial domain as the forecast show best skill reaching mean-square-error skill improvements of up to 3% (day ahead) or 1% (week ahead). Only considering land surface improvements in Europe, improvements of 4%–6% for day-ahead forecasts and 1%–5% for week-ahead forecasts are observable. We believe that this study not only introduces a simple yet effective tool to reduce bias in temperature forecasts but also contributes to the active discussion of how valuable weather patterns are and how to use them within forecast calibration techniques.