EuLerian Identification of ascending AirStreams (ELIAS 2.0) in numerical weather prediction and climate models – Part 2: Model application to different datasets

Julian Quinting, Christian Michael Grams, Annika Oertel, Moritz Pickl

Geoscientific model development · 27 January 2022 · Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)

In one sentence. Applies the CNN warm conveyor belt identifier to reanalyses and ECMWF ensembles, showing CNN and trajectory methods agree on North Atlantic forecast biases.

Abstract

Abstract. Warm conveyor belts (WCBs) affect the atmospheric dynamics in midlatitudes and are highly relevant for total and extreme precipitation in many parts of the extratropics. Thus, these air streams and their effect on midlatitude weather should be well represented in numerical weather prediction (NWP) and climate models. This study applies newly developed convolutional neural network (CNN) models which allow the identification of footprints of WCB inflow, ascent, and outflow from a limited number of predictor fields at comparably low spatio-temporal resolution. The goal of the study is to demonstrate the versatile applicability of the CNN models to different data sets and that their application yields qualitatively and quantitatively similar results as their trajectory-based counterpart which is most frequently used to objectively identify WCBs but requires data at higher spatio-temporal resolution which is often not available and is computationally more expensive. First, an application to reanalyses reveals that the well-known relationship between WCB ascent and extratropical cyclones as well as between WCB outflow and blocking anticyclones is also found for WCB footprints identified with the CNN models. Second, the application to Japanese 55-year reanalyses shows how the CNN models may be used to identify erroneous predictor fields that deteriorate the models' reliability. Third, a verification of WCBs in operational European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) ensemble forecasts for three Northern Hemisphere winters reveals systematic biases over the North Atlantic with both the trajectory-based approach and the CNN models. The ensemble forecasts' skill tends to be lower when being evaluated with the trajectory approach due to the fine-scale structure of WCB footprints in comparison to the rather smooth CNN-based WCB footprints. A final example demonstrates the applicability of the CNN models to a convection permitting simulation with the ICOsahedral Nonhydrostatic (ICON) NWP model. Our study illustrates that deep learning methods can be used efficiently to support process-oriented understanding of forecast error and model biases, and opens numerous directions for future research.

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