Verification of wind forecasts for the airports Hammerfest, Honningsvåg, Sandnessjøen, Ørsta, Værnes, Sandane and Narvik

Atmospheric turbulence still accounts for a significant percentage of weather-related aircraft incidents in Norway. A turbulence modelling project is run by SINTEF in cooperation with the Norwegian Meteorological lnstitute. A nested model system designed for forecasting atmospheric turb-ulence has been developed. From ltr;rrdz}}7 the system has been operated for seven airports in Norway. The present validation report includes a short description of the model system. We have included verification against surface SYNOP observations for Vernes and all the other six airports the system is operated for. In the project it has been decided to do a special study for Vernes airport. The airport is chosen as the one of the seven for which there are available AMDAR reports from aircrafts on a regualar basis. In order to study the quality of those observations in more detail, TEMP observations from }rlandetairport situated some km west of Vrernes are used in this study. The models validated includes HIRLAM 1O-lar (1O-lffn resolution), UM 4-km and UM l-km (Inified Model' 4-krn and 1-km horizontal resolution) and the SIMRA model (approximately 100m r.rilutionj. Verification results from the period 1. September to 15. December 200i arepresented.