Search

The Meteorological Service of Canada held a series of three Forecasters Forum meetings between 2003 and 2005 to seek input from the meteorological community on the best ways to implement a restructuring strategy and to develop a common vision related to the provision of weather forecasts. The meeting provided significant insight into a number of topics related to operational forecasting in Canada and have added to the larger discussion on these issues in the international meteorological community. During the course of the three forums, several themes emerged as overarching concerns. Foremost among them was the future role of the human forecaster. Most forum participants believed that human forecasters should be the "heart of weather prediction," with an increased emphasis on the analysis/ diagnosis/prognosis paradigm, and recommended developing the sophisticated tools required to facilitate that role. Using results from the forums, it is suggested here that the primary role of the future forecaster should be to develop and maintain a sequence of plan-view composite depictions evolving through time to best represent the current and future states of the atmosphere. This would be accomplished using an area-based, object-oriented analysis/forecast system, with a toolbox of numerical weather prediction guidance and carefully designed artificial intelligence assistants. The forecaster's work would be focused on high-impact weather events, mainly in the short term but also in the longer term when necessary. Products would be automatically generated from the weather object database, allowing the forecast team to focus on "hands on" meteorology and maintaining shared situational awareness at all times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Observations from the 2015 Environment and Climate Change Canada Pan/Parapan American Science Showcase (ECPASS) and real-case, cloud-resolving numerical simulations with the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model are used to investigate two cases of moist convection forced by lake-breeze convergence over southern Ontario (18 July and 15 August 2015). The two cases shared several characteristics, including high pressure conditions, similar morning soundings, and isolated afternoon convection along a line of lake-breeze convergence between Lakes Erie and Ontario. However, the convection was significantly stronger in the August case, with robustly deeper clouds and larger radar reflectivities than in the July case. Synoptic and mesoscale analyses of these events reveal that the key difference between them was their large-scale forcing. The July event exhibited a combination of strong warm advection and large-scale descent at midlevels (850–650 hPa), which created an inversion layer that capped cloud tops at 4–6 km. The August case exhibited similar features (large-scale descent and warm advection), but these were focused at higher levels (700–400 hPa) and weaker. As a consequence, the convection in the August case was less suppressed at midlevels and ascended deeper (reaching over 8 km). Although the subcloud updraft along the lake-breeze convergence zone was also found to be stronger in the August case, this difference was found to be an effect, rather than a cause, of stronger moist convection within the cloud layer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban-scale Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) systems will be important tools for decision-making in and around large cities in a changing climate exposed to more extreme weather events. Such a state-of-the-art real-time system down to 250-m grid spacing was implemented in the context of the Toronto 2015 Panamerican games, Canada (PanAm). Combined with the Global Environmental Multiscale (GEM) model, attention was brought to the representation of the detailed urban landscape, and to the inclusion of sub-daily variation of the Great Lakes surface temperature. Results show a refined representation of the urban coastal environment micro-meteorology with a strong anisotropy of the urban heat island reaching about 2 °C on average for the summer season, coastal upwelling, and mesoscale features such as cumulus clouds and lake-breeze flow. Objective evaluation at the surface with a dense observational network reveals an overall good performance of the system and a clear improvement in comparison to reference forecasts at 2.5-km grid spacing in particular for standard deviation errors in urban areas up to 0.3 °C for temperature and dew point temperature, and up to 0.5 m s − 1 for the wind speed, as well as for precipitation with an increased Equitable Threat Score (ETS) by up to 0.3 for the evening accumulation. The study provides confidence in the capacity of the new system to improve weather forecasts to be delivered to urban dwellers although further investigation of the initialization methods in urban areas is needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the principal aims of the Sydney 2000 Forecast Demonstration Project was to assess the utility of advanced nowcasting systems to operational severe weather forecasters. This paper describes the application of the products of a variety of systems by forecasters during a severe weather event in Sydney, Australia, on 3 November 2000. During this day a severe storm developed to the south of the metropolitan area and tracked north producing large, damaging hail, heavy rainfall, and at least three tornadoes. A number of severe weather warnings were issued by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology to a variety of customers throughout the day. This paper investigates how the novel nowcast products were used by the forecasters and the impact they had on the forecast and warning dissemination procedure. The products used are contrasted with those that were available or could have been made available at various stages of the storm development and the efficiency of use of these products is discussed. The severe weather forecasters expressed their satisfaction with the systems and believed that the additional information enhanced the quality and timeliness of the warnings issued during the event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]