A Comparison of Automated Methods of Front Recognition for Climate Studies: A Case Study in Southwest Western Australia

Abstract

The identification of extratropical fronts in reanalyses and climate models is an important climate diagnostic that aids dynamical understanding and model verification. This study compares six frontal identification methods that are applied to June and July reanalysis data over the Central Wheatbelt of southwest Western Australia for 1979-2006. Much of the winter rainfall over this region originates from frontal systems. Five of the methods use automated algorithms. These make use of different approaches, based on shifts in 850-hPa winds (WND), gradients of temperature (TGR) and wet-bulb potential temperature (WPT), pattern matching (PMM), and a self-organizing map (SOM). The sixth method wa..