Medium-range predictability of temperature extremes and biases in Rossby-wave amplitude

Abstract

This study investigates the medium-range predictability of warm and cold extremes in the Northern Hemisphere and the role that upper-tropospheric circulation biases play in this regard. Deterministic ERA5 reforecasts for the period 1979–2019 are evaluated based on the ERA5 reanalysis of the respective period, thus providing a large sample for verification and bias identification. The predictability of temperature extremes at 850 hPa is assessed based on the Gilbert Skill Score and other metrics and is shown to exhibit regional and seasonal variations. Summer is generally characterized by lower forecast skill scores than winter for both warm and cold extremes. Moreover, cold extremes in summer have slightly lower skill scores than warm extremes, while the opposite is true in winter. Biases in the frequency of temperature extremes are, to some extent, consistent with biases in mean temperature and indicate an underestimation in the total amount of extremes for much of the hemisphere in summer. Associated with the latter, biases also emerge in the standard deviation of the daily temperature distribution, with the summer values being largely underestimated over most of the hemisphere. The role of upper-tropospheric circulation in these biases is then assessed by verifying the representation of Rossby-wave packet (RWP) properties. It is found that the amplitude of RWPs is systematically underestimated in most of the hemisphere in summer, while it is overestimated in many parts of the midlatitudes in winter. Overall, the results suggest that the underestimation of RWP amplitude in summer hinders the medium-range predictability of temperature extremes in the explored retrospective and operational forecasts. Although operational European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) forecasts gradually improve between 2013 and 2022 in terms of the 850-hPa temperature and 300-hPa RWP amplitude absolute errors, the aforementioned summer biases remain qualitatively similar.