Comparison of verification results of the Numerical Weather Prediction models operated at ICM

At ICM in quasi-operational form two non-hydrostatic numerical weather prediction models are operated, Unified Model developed by UK Meteorological Office and COAMPS (Coupled Ocean/Atmosphere Mesoscale Prediction System) developed by US Naval Research Laboratory. Unified Model has horizontal reso-lution of 4 km and 38 levels in vertical. COAMPS model is configured with three nested grids and horizontal resolutions of 39, 13 and 4.3 km. UM and the second grid of COAMPS cover the area of Central Europe. In this paper results of both NWP models, i.e. COAMPS computed on 13 km mesh resolution and UM were verified against observations from 60 Polish synoptic stations. In the verification process surface observations were compared with the nearest gridpoint forecasts. Only results from 00 UTC model runs were used.For the following meteorological elements: 2m air temperature, wind speed and wind direction at 10 m, mean sea level pressure ME, MAE and RMSE are presented. In case of 12 hour accumulated precipitation contingency tables for selected thresholds were constructed and their results were used to obtain FBI, ETS, POD and FAR. The verification sample covers period since June 2009 to November 2010.     ...

Water requirement forecast-internet platform for forecasting fruit crop water needs prepared in the frames of PROZA project

In 1997 the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling (ICM), University of Warsaw launched the Internet weather service which delivers numerical weather forecasts for individual consumers and has become a basis for several weather-related scientific projects. The project "Op-erational decision-making based on atmospheric conditions" (PROZA) (started in September 2009) utilizes data obtained from weather service provided by ICM. The Research Institute of Horticulture is one of the partners in the project. The institute participates in task 3 of the project: "Application of numerical weather forecasts in forestry and fruit farming". In the frame of this task, an Internet platform for forecasting of spring frosts and fruit crop water needs was developed. https://prognozy.projekt-proza.pl/. A user (after logging in) has access to the following information (forecast is prepared for 3 days): ETo, precipitation, climatic water balance and water requirements of major fruit crops. Data on amount of (easily) available water in root zone are also available. The information provided by the service make controlling of irrigation easier and thus improve agricultural water use efficiency. The estimation of forecasting quality showed that the accuracy of forecast was high proving its practical value for fruit growers. ...