Operational forecasting of daily summer maximum and minimum temperatures in the Valencia Region

Abstract

ABSTRACT.Extreme temperature events have a great impact on human society. Thus, knowledge of summer temperatures can be very useful both for the general public and for organisations whose workers operate in the open. An accurate forecasting of summer maximum and minimum temperatures could help to predict heat-wave conditions and permit the implementation of strategies aimed at minimizing the negative effects that high temperatures have on human health. The objective of this work is to evaluate the skill of the RAMS model in determining daily summer maximum and minimum temperatures in the Valencia Region. For this, we have used the real-time configuration of this model currently running at the CEAM Foundation. This operational system is run twice a day, and both runs have a three-days forecast range. To carry out the verification of the model in this work, the information generated by the system has been broken into individual simulation days for a specific daily run of the model. Moreover, we have analysed the summer forecast period agreement between observed and simulated maximum temperatures, with RMSE in general near 2 ºC both for coastal and inland stations. For this parameter, the model shows a negative bias around -1.5 ºC in the coast while the opposite trend is observed inland. In addition, RAMS also shows good results in forecasting minimum temperatures for coastal locations, with bias lower than 1 ºC and RMSE below 2 ºC. However, the model presents some difficulties for this parameter inland, where bias higher than 3 ºC and RMSE of about 4 ºC have been found. Besides, there is little difference in both temperatures forecasted within the two daily RAMS cycles and that RAMS is very stable in maintaining the forecast performance at least for three forecast days.

Real-time weather forecasting in the Western Mediterranean Basin: An application of the RAMS model

“…Thus, taking this results into account and in order to clarify the presentation of the To make the paper clearer, we present here the differences between coastal and inland stations in a seasonal way taking into account all data available for all years. The behaviour of the model found for maximum and minimum temperature taking into account coastal and inland stations separately is in accordance with the results found over this area by Gómez et al (2013).…”

“…Besides, the differences found between the modelled and observed relative humidity for the rest of the day are rather alike. Thus, as it was already stated by Gómez et al (2013), during summer a different behaviour of the temperature is observed between day time hours and night time for both coastal and inland stations in the Valencia Region.…”

“…These data have been stored for the three days of simulation of the model. More information about the software developed may be found in Gómez et al (2013). (Papanastasiou, 2010;Federico, 2011;Kotroni, 2011;Hernández-Ceballos et al, 2013).…”

“…This area exhibits a relevant interest from a meteorological point of view, as it is particularly sensitive to certain severe weather events. Among them, we must highlight episodes of forest fires (Gómez-Tejedor et al, 1999) and heat waves (Miró et al, 2006;Gómez et al, 2010;Gómez et al, 2013) in the summer. In addition, during the late summer and autumn, episodes of torrential rains are also common over this region (Millán et al, 1995;Estrela et al, 2002;Millán et al, 2005).…”

Impact of Initial Soil Temperature Derived from Remote Sensing and Numerical Weather Prediction Datasets on the Simulation of Extreme Heat Events

“…It is well known that mesoscale circulations associated with sea-land breezes are the most common meteorological conditions during the summer months over this area [30][31][32][33][34]. However, atmospheric conditions connected to western synoptic advections are also recognized in this region as they are related to high and extreme temperature situations, especially inland but reaching the coast as well [4,32,33,35,36]. Consequently, warm spells that result in temperatures higher than 40 °C are not unusual for this area [4,7,32,33,35,36].…”