A Real-Time Regional Forecasting System Established for the South China Sea and Its Performance in the Track Forecasts of Tropical Cyclones during 2011-13

AbstractA real-time regional forecasting system for the South China Sea (SCS), called the Experimental Platform of Marine Environment Forecasting (EPMEF), is introduced in this paper. EPMEF consists of a regional atmosphere model, a regional ocean model, and a wave model, and performs a real-time run four times a day. Output from the Global Forecast System (GFS) from the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) is used as the initial and boundary conditions of two nested domains of the atmosphere model, which can exert a constraint on the development of small- and mesoscale atmospheric perturbations through dynamical downscaling. The forecasted winds at 10-m height from the atmosphere model are used to drive the ocean and wave models. As an initial evaluation, a census on the track predictions of 44 tropical cyclones (TCs) during 2011–13 indicates that the performance of EPMEF is very encouraging and comparable to those of other official agencies worldwide. In particular, EPMEF successfully pr...