Each week, we select a recently published Open Access article to feature. This week’s article comes from Environmetrics and offers a new method for determining wind speed ensemble forecasts.
The article’s abstract is given below, with the full article available to read here.
, , . Truncated generalized extreme value distribution‐based ensemble model output statistics model for calibration of wind speed ensemble forecasts. Environmetrics. 2021;e2678.
https://doi.org/10.1002/env.2678
https://doi.org/10.1002/env.2678
In recent years, ensemble weather forecasting has become a routine at all major weather prediction centers. These forecasts are obtained from multiple runs of numerical weather prediction models with different initial conditions or model parametrizations. However, ensemble forecasts can often be underdispersive and also biased, so some kind of postprocessing is needed to account for these deficiencies. One of the most popular state of the art statistical postprocessing techniques is the ensemble model output statistics (EMOS), which provides a full predictive distribution of the studied weather quantity. We propose a novel EMOS model for calibrating wind speed ensemble forecasts, where the predictive distribution is a generalized extreme value (GEV) distribution left truncated at zero (TGEV). The truncation corrects the disadvantage of the GEV distribution‐based EMOS models of occasionally predicting negative wind speed values, without affecting its favorable properties. The new model is tested on four datasets of wind speed ensemble forecasts provided by three different ensemble prediction systems, covering various geographical domains and time periods. The forecast skill of the TGEV EMOS model is compared with the predictive performance of the truncated normal, log‐normal and GEV methods and the raw and climatological forecasts as well. The results verify the advantageous properties of the novel TGEV EMOS approach.