scholarly journals Probabilistic forecasting of shallow, rainfall-triggered landslides using real-time numerical weather predictions

2008 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 349-357 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Schmidt ◽  
G. Turek ◽  
M. P. Clark ◽  
M. Uddstrom ◽  
J. R. Dymond

Abstract. A project established at the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) in New Zealand is aimed at developing a prototype of a real-time landslide forecasting system. The objective is to predict temporal changes in landslide probability for shallow, rainfall-triggered landslides, based on quantitative weather forecasts from numerical weather prediction models. Global weather forecasts from the United Kingdom Met Office (MO) Numerical Weather Prediction model (NWP) are coupled with a regional data assimilating NWP model (New Zealand Limited Area Model, NZLAM) to forecast atmospheric variables such as precipitation and temperature up to 48 h ahead for all of New Zealand. The weather forecasts are fed into a hydrologic model to predict development of soil moisture and groundwater levels. The forecasted catchment-scale patterns in soil moisture and soil saturation are then downscaled using topographic indices to predict soil moisture status at the local scale, and an infinite slope stability model is applied to determine the triggering soil water threshold at a local scale. The model uses uncertainty of soil parameters to produce probabilistic forecasts of spatio-temporal landslide occurrence 48~h ahead. The system was evaluated for a damaging landslide event in New Zealand. Comparison with landslide densities estimated from satellite imagery resulted in hit rates of 70–90%.

2003 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 379-389 ◽  
Author(s):  
M.D. Goldberg ◽  
Yanni Qu ◽  
L.M. McMillin ◽  
W. Wolf ◽  
Lihang Zhou ◽  
...  

2004 ◽  
Vol 82 (1B) ◽  
pp. 361-370 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerd GENDT ◽  
Galina DICK ◽  
Christoph REIGBER ◽  
Maria TOMASSINI ◽  
Yanxiong LIU ◽  
...  

2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (6) ◽  
pp. 1985-1996 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Siuta ◽  
Gregory West ◽  
Henryk Modzelewski ◽  
Roland Schigas ◽  
Roland Stull

Abstract As cloud-service providers like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft decrease costs and increase performance, numerical weather prediction (NWP) in the cloud will become a reality not only for research use but for real-time use as well. The performance of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model on the Google Cloud Platform is tested and configurations and optimizations of virtual machines that meet two main requirements of real-time NWP are found: 1) fast forecast completion (timeliness) and 2) economic cost effectiveness when compared with traditional on-premise high-performance computing hardware. Optimum performance was found by using the Intel compiler collection with no more than eight virtual CPUs per virtual machine. Using these configurations, real-time NWP on the Google Cloud Platform is found to be economically competitive when compared with the purchase of local high-performance computing hardware for NWP needs. Cloud-computing services are becoming viable alternatives to on-premise compute clusters for some applications.


Atmosphere ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 205
Author(s):  
Laura Rontu ◽  
Emily Gleeson ◽  
Daniel Martin Perez ◽  
Kristian Pagh Nielsen ◽  
Velle Toll

The direct radiative effect of aerosols is taken into account in many limited-area numerical weather prediction models using wavelength-dependent aerosol optical depths of a range of aerosol species. We studied the impact of aerosol distribution and optical properties on radiative transfer, based on climatological and more realistic near real-time aerosol data. Sensitivity tests were carried out using the single-column version of the ALADIN-HIRLAM numerical weather prediction system, set up to use the HLRADIA simple broadband radiation scheme. The tests were restricted to clear-sky cases to avoid the complication of cloud–radiation–aerosol interactions. The largest differences in radiative fluxes and heating rates were found to be due to different aerosol loads. When the loads are large, the radiative fluxes and heating rates are sensitive to the aerosol inherent optical properties and the vertical distribution of the aerosol species. In such cases, regional weather models should use external real-time aerosol data for radiation parametrizations. Impacts of aerosols on shortwave radiation dominate longwave impacts. Sensitivity experiments indicated the important effects of highly absorbing black carbon aerosols and strongly scattering desert dust.


2007 ◽  
Vol 46 (7) ◽  
pp. 1053-1066 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Root ◽  
Paul Knight ◽  
George Young ◽  
Steven Greybush ◽  
Richard Grumm ◽  
...  

Abstract Advances in numerical weather prediction have occurred on numerous fronts, from sophisticated physics packages in the latest mesoscale models to multimodel ensembles of medium-range predictions. Thus, the skill of numerical weather forecasts continues to increase. Statistical techniques have further increased the utility of these predictions. The availability of large atmospheric datasets and faster computers has made pattern recognition of major weather events a feasible means of statistically enhancing the value of numerical forecasts. This paper examines the utility of pattern recognition in assisting the prediction of severe and major weather in the Middle Atlantic region. An important innovation in this work is that the analog technique is applied to NWP forecast maps as a pattern-recognition tool rather than to analysis maps as a forecast tool. A technique is described that employs a new clustering algorithm to objectively identify the anomaly patterns or “fingerprints” associated with past events. The potential refinement and applicability of this method as an operational forecasting tool employed by comparing numerical weather prediction forecasts with fingerprints already identified for major weather events are also discussed.


Author(s):  
Xiang-Yu Huang ◽  
Dale Barker ◽  
Stuart Webster ◽  
Anurag Dipankar ◽  
Adrian Lock ◽  
...  

Extreme rainfall is one of the primary meteorological hazards in Singapore, as well as elsewhere in the deep tropics, and it can lead to significant local flooding. Since 2013, the Meteorological Service Singapore (MSS) and the United Kingdom Met Office (UKMO) have been collaborating to develop a convective-scale Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) system, called SINGV. Its primary aim is to provide improved weather forecasts for Singapore and the surrounding region, with a focus on improved short-range prediction of localized heavy rainfall. This paper provides an overview of the SINGV development, the latest NWP capabilities at MSS and some key results of evaluation. The paper describes science advances relevant to the development of any km-scale NWP suitable for the deep tropics and provides some insights into the impact of local data assimilation and utility of ensemble predictions.


Author(s):  
Clara Sophie Draper

AbstractThe ensembles used in the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) global data assimilation and numerical weather prediction (NWP) system are under-dispersed at and near the land surface, preventing their use in ensemble-based land data assimilation. Comparison to offline (land-only) data assimilation ensemble systems suggests that while the relevant atmospheric fields are under-dispersed in NCEP’s system, this alone cannot explain the under-dispersed land component, and an additional scheme is required to explicitly account for land model error. This study then investigates several schemes for perturbing the soil (moisture and temperature) states in NCEP’s system, qualitatively comparing the induced ensemble spread to independent estimates of the forecast error standard deviation in soil moisture, soil temperature, 2m temperature, and 2m humidity. Directly adding perturbations to the soil states, as is commonly done in offline systems, generated unrealistic spatial patterns in the soil moisture ensemble spread. Application of a Stochastically Perturbed Physics Tendencies scheme to the soil states is inherently limited in the amount of soil moisture spread that it can induce. Perturbing the land model parameters, in this case vegetation fraction, generated a realistic distribution in the ensemble spread, while also inducing perturbations in the land (soil states) and atmosphere (2m states) that are consistent with errors in the land/atmosphere fluxes. The parameter perturbation method is then recommended for NCEP’s ensemble system, and it is currently being refined within the development of an ensemble-based coupled land/atmosphere data assimilation for NCEP’s NWP system.


2014 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 1772-1786 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan L. Case ◽  
Frank J. LaFontaine ◽  
Jordan R. Bell ◽  
Gary J. Jedlovec ◽  
Sujay V. Kumar ◽  
...  

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