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Predictability and Processes
Research Themes
Selected Activities

a) Prepare a review paper on the occurrence and predictability of damaging winds associated with different types of weather system, including the influence of the boundary layer and land surface and implications for their representation in models. 


b) Create a catalogue of high impact weather events (focusing on Urban Floods, Extreme Local Winds and Disruptive Winter Weather) for which datasets are available. Set up a wiki facility to enable case information to be added. 


c) Select 1 or 2 cases of each type for use in inter-comparisons. Identify the critical parameters and thresholds for these cases and design protocols that will enable intercomparison of high impact weather prediction capability. Recruit prediction systems, collect and archive results and publish the results. 


d) Lead the cross-cutting activities to design and execute field campaigns and RDPs focused on multi-scale predictability, the primary candidates being: in mid-latitudes, the THORPEX North Atlantic Waveguide & Downstream Development Experiment (NAWDEX/DOWNSTREAM); in the African Tropics, the Lake Victoria Basin ‐ Hydroclimate to Nowcasting Early Warning System (LVB-HyNEWS) and in sub-tropical South America, the Research & Development project for improving the prediction of high impact weather systems over the La Plata Basin (ALERT.AR)/ Remote sensing of Electrification, Lightning & Mesoscale / microscale Processes with Adaptive Groundbased Observations (RELAMPAGO). Link with other field campaigns that address key challenges. 


e) Together with the Multi-Scale Forecasting theme, initiate a series of workshops focused on advancing knowledge and understanding of the sources of convective and turbulent scale errors and the growth of these errors during timescales from one to twelve hours.  


f) Together with the Multi-Scale Forecasting theme, quantify uncertainty in microphysics processes, parameters and fields, and assess the implications for the interaction with dynamical fields. 


g) Hold targeted workshops on wildfires, with the aim of understanding the processes that are important in creating hazardous conditions, including large scale control, stationarity, diabatic heating and pre-conditioning. 


h) Hold a workshop with mathematicians to explore aspects of highly non-linear behavior, particularly bifurcations, of relevance to high impact weather, and to identify mathematical tools for describing and predicting such behavior. Apply the results to the design of convective-scale probabilistic forecasting systems.


i) Hold a summer school to set up a grand ensemble integration facility for reforecast convective-scale ensembles. 


j) Lead a cross-cutting activity to develop the use of models by operational meteorologists to diagnose the origins of hazardous weather features, e.g. using back trajectory techniques. Evaluate the benefit in FDPs, testbeds etc. and publish the results. 


k) Lead the cross-cutting activity, in collaboration with mathematics experts, to review and synthesise work on stochastic physics and model error in ensembles, and to promote new work, leading to publication of new recommendations for parametrization design for ensemble prediction systems. 


l) Lead the cross-cutting activity to develop and apply model diagnostic tools to identify model processes that have caused major forecast errors (busts).


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