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Numerical Weather Prediction model information?

Posted: Thu Apr 08, 2004 9:31 pm
by OhioGuy
Are there any good websites or books that have information on the different numerical models, including ETA, GFS, RUC, UKMET, ECMWF, and GEM? I'm specifically looking for information on biases that these models have for North American weather (specifically US and Canadian weather). Any additional information on those models would be great as well, but I'm really interested in some information on the biases that each tend to exhibit.

Posted: Fri Apr 09, 2004 6:03 am
by MarcC
Hi,

There are a number of resources out there. As far as books go, Tim's Weather Map Handbook has information on history and biases on most models used by American forecasters. He has one page of text on each model, so it's not like a treatise, but there's some interesting information in these pages.

Moving on to websites, the Hydrometeorological Prediction Center is the main place where you can find the officially noted biases. Their list of subjctive biases (biases noted by forecasters) is somewhat disappointing in that they have no biases recorded for many international models. They do have a number of biases listed for the operational models here in the US, though. Here's the website for this list:

http://www.hpc.ncep.noaa.gov/mdlbias/biastext.shtml

The HPC also has a page where you can interactively view the errors of a number of commonly used models for different forecast times and variables. This page is here:

http://www.hpc.ncep.noaa.gov/mdlbias/

I hope these pages help.

Regards,
Marc