Impacts of a Large-scale Adaptive Blending Scheme for CMA-MESO on Regional Forecasts-A Case Study of Typhoon Haima

Large-scale atmospheric information plays an important role in the regional model for the forecasts of weather such as tropical cyclone (TC). However, it is difficult to be fully represented in regional models due to domain size and a lack of observation data, particularly at sea used in regional data assimilation. Blending analysis has been developed and implemented in regional models to reintroduce large-scale information from global model to regional analysis. Research of the impact of this large-scale blending scheme for the Global / Regional Assimilation and PrEdiction System (GRAPES) model on TC forecasting is limited and this study attempts to further progress by examining the adaptivity of the blending scheme using the two-dimensional Discrete Cosine Transform (2D-DCT) filter on the model forecast of Typhoon Haima over Shenzhen, China in 2016 and considering various cut-off wavelengths. Results showed that the error of the 24-hour typhoon track forecast can be reduced to less than 25 km by applying the scale-dependent blending scheme, indicating that the blending analysis is effectively able to minimise the large-scale bias for the initial fields. The improvement of the wind forecast is more evident for u-wind component according to the reduced root mean square errors (RMSEs) by comparing the experiments with and without blending analysis. Furthermore, the higher equitable threat score (ETS) provided implications that the precipitation prediction skills were increased in the 24h forecast by improving the representation of the large-scale feature in the GRAPES analysis. Furthermore, significant differences of the track error forecast were found by applying the blending analysis with different cut-off wavelengths from 400 km to 1200 km and the track error can be reduced less than by 10 km with 400 km cut-off wavelength in the first 6h forecast. It highlighted that the blending scheme with dynamic cut-off wavelengths adapted to the development of different TC systems is necessary in order to optimally introduce and ingest the large-scale information from global model to the regional model for improving the TC forecast. In this paper, the methods and data applied in this study will be firstly introduced, before discussion of the results regarding the performance of the blending analysis and its impacts on the wind and precipitation forecast correspondingly, followed by the discussion of the effects of different blending scheme on TC forecasts and the conclusion section.