Heteroscedastic ensemble postprocessing

Abstract

Ensemble variances provide a prediction of the flow-dependent error variance of the ensemble mean or, possibly, a high-resolution forecast. However, small ensemble size, unaccounted for model error, and imperfections in ensemble generation schemes cause the predictions of error variance to be imperfect. In previous work, the authors developed an analytic approximation to the posterior distribution of true error variances, given an imperfect ensemble prediction, based on parameters recovered from long archives of innovation and ensemble variance pairs. This paper shows how heteroscedastic postprocessing enables climatological information to be blended with ensemble forecast information when i..