The Track and Accompanying Sea Wave Forecasts of the Supertyphoon Mangkhut (2018) by a Real-Time Regional Forecast System

Abstract

AbstractThe track and accompanying sea wave forecasts of Typhoon Mangkhut (2018) by a real-time regional forecasting system are assessed in this study. The real-time regional forecasting system shows a good track forecast skill with a mean error of 69.9 km for the forecast period of 1–72 h. In particular, it predicted well the landfall location on the coastal island of South China with distance (time) biases of 76.89 km (3 h) averaging over all forecasting made during 1–72 h and only 3.55 km (1 h) for the forecasting initialized 27 h ahead of the landfall. The sea waves induced by Mangkhut (2018) were also predicted well by the wave model of the forecasting system with a mean error of 0.54 m and a mean correlation coefficient up to 0.94 for significant wave height. Results from sensitivity experiments show that the improvement of track forecasting skill for Mangkhut (2018) are mainly attributed to application of a scale-selective data assimilation scheme in the atmosphere model that helps to maintain a more realistic large-scale flow obtained from the GFS forecasts, whereas the air–sea coupling has slightly negative impact on the track forecast skill.