Automatic Model Calibration: A New Way to Improve Numerical Weather Forecasting

Weather forecasting skill has been improved over recent years owing to advances in the representation of physical processes by numerical weather prediction (NWP) models, observational systems, data assimilation and postprocessing, new computational capability, and effective communications and training. There is an area that has received less attention so far but can bring significant improvement to weather forecasting—the calibration of NWP models, a process in which model parameters are tuned using certain mathematical methods to minimize the difference between predictions and observations. Model calibration of the NWP models is difficult because 1) there are a formidable number of model parameters and meteorological variables to tune, and 2) a typical NWP model is very expensive to run, and conventional model calibration methods require many model runs (up to tens of thousands) or cannot handle the high dimensionality of NWP models. This study demonstrates that a newly developed automatic model calibration platform can overcome these difficulties and improve weather forecasting through parameter optimization. We illustrate how this is done with a case study involving 5-day weather forecasting during the summer monsoon in the greater Beijing region using the Weather Research and Forecasting Model. The keys to automatic model calibration are to use global sensitivity analysis to screen out the most important parameters influencing model performance and to employ surrogate models to reduce the need for a large number of model runs. Through several optimization and validation studies, we have shown that automatic model calibration can improve precipitation and temperature forecasting significantly according to a number of performance measures.