8.3      Evaluation of surface sensible weather forecasts by the MPAS model.

Cheng, William Y.Y., Wanli Wu, Tom Henderson, Tim Brown, Paul Madden, Christina Holt, Mike Kay, Dusanka Zupanski, Razvan Stefanescu, Alexander MacDonald, Spire Global Inc, and Laura Fowler, NCAR

In the past few years, there have been a number of presentations at the WRF/MPAS
Workshop focusing on MPAS's performance on precipitation, tropical cyclogenesis, tropical cyclone tracks and other phenomena. However, there have been few (if any) MPAS studies evaluating the performance on the performance of MPAS of surfcace sensible weather forecasts such as 2-m temperature, 2-m moisture, and 10-m wind. These weather variables are of particular interests to forecasters and the general public. We have verified the surface sensible weather variables from two daily cycles of 7-day forecast for nearly a year with MPAS 6.1 using surface stations over land (ADPSFC) from GDAS Prepbufr data. We examined the error statistics in different regions of the globe to identify the strengths and weaknesses of MPAS. Furthermore, we also verified the same forecasts from the GFS model to serve as a baseline to compare MPAS. We hope that this study can help developers improve the MPAS model.