Real-Time Forecasting of the Western Australian Summertime Trough: Evaluation of a New Regional Model

Abstract

The real-time prediction of the location, strength, and structure of the summertime heat trough is a major forecasting problem over Western Australia. Maximum temperatures, wind strength and direction along the west coast, low-level coastal cloud, and thunderstorm activity are vulnerable to forecast errors in the heat trough. This study has three main parts. First, prediction errors of the operational Australian region numerical weather prediction (NWP) model were quantified over the period December 1991 to February 1992. Second, a newly developed regional NWP model, which will be the next operational regional model, was compared with the current operational model. The new model has more efficient numerics than the present operational model, allowing higher-resolution forecasts and a more sophisticated representation of physical processes. The third part was a set of sensitivity experiments to assess the relative importance of the differences. The dominant errors in the current operational model are a large westward bias in the trough location, a wide spread of errors in the intensity of the low in the northern section of the heat trough, a sizable range of coastal pressure gradient errors, and a northward bias in the latitude of the subtropical ridge axis between longitudes 110° and 120°E. It was demonstrated that these errors are reduced significantly in the new model, especially the subtropical ridge error, which has been virtually eliminated. The sensitivity studies revealed the importance of each of the differences between the models, and that the relative impact varies from case to case.