Ponente
Descripción
Three agencies that produce daily operational air quality forecasts for North America began to exchange their forecasts on a routine basis in 2017, allowing a side-by-side comparison and ongoing evaluation of four different forecasts. The three agencies were Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC), which produces two slightly different forecasts, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). ECCC developed the multi-model verification system that receives and ingests the North American AQ forecasts from each centre and then evaluates the forecasts using near-real-time North American hourly surface measurements of O3, NO2, and PM2.5 levels. A set of monthly multi-model performance statistics for North American daily maximum forecasts of O3, NO2, and PM2.5 are automatically generated at the end of each month and shared with the participating centres on a seasonal basis. More recently, two more global forecast systems run by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI) have joined this international collaboration for a total of six forecast systems, three regional and three global. By exchanging forecast scores on a regular basis, this international collaboration provides useful information on multi-model performance, including peer performance, seasonal variations and trends, unusual periods, and the impacts of model upgrades implemented by each centre.
