Best Practices for Road Weather Management Version 2.0
Title:
An Ensemble Strategy for Road Weather Applications
Abstract:
Ensemble modeling methods for supporting road weather operations are described as they were applied in the first three years of a road weather field project called MDSS (Maintenance Decision Support System). MDSS is a project aimed at improving weather services for surface transportation, specifically winter weather operations. The MDSS system takes weather forecast information from many different sources, optimizes predictions for a few dozen points along highways where there are observations sites for validation, and produces suggestions to snow plow supervisors regarding best places to plow, how often, and how much salt or other chemical to use. This paper reports on MDSS demonstrations in central Iowa during two-month periods beginning in January 2003 and December 2003. It will be shown that for this application, varying the lateral boundary conditions added negligible dispersion to the ensemble. On the third iteration, we settled on two different models (MM5 and WRF), 24-hr model runs on identical grids, reinitializing each model every hour with diabatic initialization grids produced by FSL's Local Analysis and Prediction System relying heavily on data from GOES satellites and WSR-88D radars. Time-lagged methods are used in the ensemble post-processing, e.g., a 5-hr forecast would use 5-hr, 6-hr, and 7-hr model outputs, all valid at the same time, from each of the two models, for a total of 6 members in the ensemble.
Source(s):
American Meteorological Society, 21st Conference on Weather Analysis and Forecasting and 17th Conference on Numerical Weather Prediction; NOAA Forecast Systems Laboratory (FSL)
http://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/92444.pdf
Date: 2005
Author:
Schultz
Keywords:
Decision support
Forecast/Prediction
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