FORecasting high-impact Weather And extreme Rainfall drivers and Dynamics for Southeast Asia (FORWARDS)  

Speaker:  Sam Ferrett

Chair(S): oSCAR mARTINEZ-ALVARADO & maria russo

wednesday december 18 2024, 13:00

ABSTRACT

In the tropics, the severe weather experienced by people on the ground, including damaging gusts, extreme precipitation rates and flooding, is primarily delivered by convective systems. These span a range of scales from individual towering cumulonimbus updrafts to mesoscale convective systems which can even reach thousands of km across in Southeast (SE) Asia. Prediction of convective systems is highly challenging  and is strongly dependent on their environment. However, there is longer range predictability in terms of the probability of heavy precipitation, associated with mesoscale convective systems (MCSs) that spin up in convective regions, but also particularly associated with larger-scale phenomena that are coupled with convection. In SE Asia the dominant variability on timescales of days to weeks (i.e., synoptic to subseasonal timescales) is linked to equatorial waves and large-scale flows, such as cold surges from the subtropics and cyclonic vortices. FORWARDS is a multi-institution project under WCSSP: SE Asia that aims to conduct research into the dynamics of weather systems that dominate the occurrence of high impact weather (HIW) across SE Asia and the ways in which their interactions influence the predictability of the tropical atmosphere and our capability to make high quality forecasts across a range of timescales. This talk will mainly focus on work based at the University of Reading that focusses on the role of equatorial waves in heavy rainfall events in SE Asia and how well these events are forecast using numerical models and statistical-dynamical hybrid forecasts.

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