Probabilistic Forecasts of Atmospheric River Events Using The HRRR Ensemble

Abstract

The nine-member High-Resolution Rapid Refresh Ensemble (HRRRE) is evaluated for its ability to forecast five Atmospheric River (AR) events that impacted California in February–March 2019. Two sets of retrospective HRRRE simulations are conducted, a control with the standard set of perturbations (initial and boundary conditions, stochastic parameters, and physics tendency), and an experiment with initial and boundary perturbations only. Reliability plots suggest the HRRRE control represents the observed Stage IV precipitation frequency well at 6-h to 24-h lead times, and rank histograms suggest the ensemble is slightly underdispersive. The HRRRE overpredicts precipitation frequency at the higher (25 mm) threshold. These results suggest the HRRRE is a useful tool to quantify probabilistic forecasts of AR events in this region. Removing stochastic physics perturbations did not substantially impact probabilistic forecasts, suggesting most of the ensemble spread is from initial and boundary condition perturbations. Spatially, ensemble precipitation coefficient of variance is lower (less forecast uncertainty) over the Sierra Nevada range than other regions, suggesting that these ensemble perturbations have a smaller impact on precipitation processes occurring over the Sierra Nevada range. More work should be conducted to understand the impacts of other model perturbations, such as microphysics, on ensemble performance, and to improve Stage IV accuracy with frozen precipitation in mountainous regions.