Monthly Teleconferences 2015 December 10, 2015 There was a rich agenda for this end-of-year NMME teleconference with an update on the NMME Phase-II data status and four reports on new research movements. NCAR/CESM planned to contribute to the real time NMME forecast ensemble, for which it had completed the hindcast of monthly mean fields for January- April, 1980 - 2010. The CPO/MAPP Model Diagnostics Task Force worked in progress on process-oriented metrics, which linked model development and evaluation to provide physical insight relating how process errors lead to model biases. It fits in with the needs of the next-generation model development at modeling centers and the upcoming CMIP6 project. The researcher in George Mason University reported to use SST as a proxy to estimate Arctic sea ice for 1982-2009, exploring possible sea ice evaluation in NMME data. Given the strong El Niņo this year, Princeton University professor planned a class group project to make real-time forecasts for 2016 winter hydroclimate in the western U.S and called for a community participation. October 8, 2015 The NMME Phase-II data processing and archiving status was updated. The documentations of model and data products were reported in progress and the NMME data highlight on NCAR ESG Climate Data Portal is expected to get online in November. Two science talks were given on 1) MME forecasting of North Atlantic tropical cyclone activity using tropical Atlantic and tropical mean SSTs as predictors by Gabriele Villarini of GFDL and 2) NMME-based hybrid prediction system, which used forecast ASO wind shear (U200-U850) over MDR as well as preseason observed North Atlantic SST, for Atlantic hurricane season activity by Jae Schemm of CPC. Results showed advantages of the NMME system and benefits from ensemble weighted average. September 10, 2015 This month NMME telecon first gave an update on the status of NMME Phase-II data, followed by science presentations of studies on the impact of land and atmospheric initializations, which revealed that contributions of atmospheric and land initial conditions to the seasonal prediction skill of two meter temperature and precipitation were mainly for the first month. The last telecon item was a joint introduction of nine newly funded FY15 MAPP projects focusing on NMME analyses/applications by project PIs. August 13, 2015 The August NMME monthly telecon focused on how to make the NMME data more user-friendly. The discussion agenda included 1) A database-query approach for the robust and efficient analysis of climate model outputs in the NMME project, 2) NMME ocean data access, 3) Interaction with operational forecasters and 4) Science presentations in coming telecons. July 7, 2015 The agenda of the telecon included an update on the status of NMME Phase-II data and feedbacks from users, and a proposal of forecast uncertainty measure to be consistent with the NMME ensemble mean forecast. According to the briefing, the Phase-II data processing and collection are on schedule. The user feedbacks concentrated on the problems of metadata inconsistency and the publishing errors, and the needs for more data services, high level products, use documentation and guidelines etc. The effort of standardizing the forecast uncertainty estimation was encouraged with discussions on further testing ideas. June 4, 2015 The discussion was led by Dr. van den Dool’s presentation, which called attention to a few issues in producing daily mean that should be treated appropriately in the NMME Phase-II data production. After discussions, the participants agreed to add specific production information in the data document for better understanding and applications by users. The need of comparison by different approaches in creating daily mean was addressed as O2R. |
