Targeted ensemble prediction for northern Europe and parts of the north Atlantic Ocean

The targeting procedure developed at ECMWF is used to make ensembles specially designed for northern Europe and parts of the north Atlantic Ocean. A total of 35 ensembles are integrated, consisting of 20 winter cases and 15 summer cases in 1997, each consisting of 20 members plus one control forecast. The ensembles are run up to day 10, and the ensemble spread inside the target area continues to increase all through the 10 days. Two distinct regimes of increase can be found, the first increase is consistent with the perturbations moving in and through the target area, it is hypothesised that the latter increase in ensemble spread around forecast day 5‐7 is connected with increasing non‐linearity. The performance of the experimental ensembles is compared to the operational ensemble prediction system (EPS) at ECMWF, both with all 50 members and with only 20 members. The spread increases when the number of members in the ensemble prediction system is increased, and the spread increases inside the target area when targeting is applied. We find that the increase in spread when going from EPS with 50 members to the targeted ensembles is larger than when going from 20 to 50 ensemble members of the operational sets. Clearly targeting must be an option when predicting for a sub‐domain of the hemisphere. Looking at other measures, such as the Brier skill score (BSS), relative operating characteristic (ROC) curves and cost/loss analyses, the impact of the targeting is modest for the winter cases, but the impact for the summer cases is evident. For the winter cases a large part of the operational perturbations were located in the same area as the targeted perturbations, and the differences for the two sets are small. For the summer cases the operational perturbations were mostly split between two locations and hence the targeting will give results differing more from the operational.