Performance Assessment of the Three-Dimensional Wind Field Weather Running Estimate - Nowcast and the Three-Dimensional Wind Field Air Force Weather Agency Weather Research and Forecasting Wind Forecasts

The Model Assessment Project conducted an evaluation of the wind forecasts produced by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) Three Dimensional Wind Field (3DWF) model as initialized by the ARL Weather Running Estimate Nowcast (WRE-N) model and the Air Force Weather Agency (AFWA) Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. The WRE-N model is a 500 m resolution application of the Advanced Research version of the WRF (WRF-ARW) with its observation nudging four-dimensional data assimilation (FDDA) option. The AFWA WRF model is the operational version of the WRF-ARW, which is run in certain theaters at 1.67 km resolution. Both models were run over a domain centered near Los Angeles, CA. Wind profiles from the 3DWF model were extracted at each of five wind profiler sites located in the domain. Wind profile observations were collected from the profiler sites. The forecast and observed wind profile data was imported into spreadsheets for quality control inspection, plotting and the calculation of standard error statistics. Hourly statistics were aggregated into composite statistics for each profiler site and date for the five case study days. The statistical results are discussed with some tabular and graphical examples and conclusions are offered, which describe the results of the comparison. The original document contains color images.