A multicase comparative assessment of the ensemble Kalman filter for assimilation of radar observations. Part II: Short-range ensemble forecasts

This work is the companion to Part I, which focused on the quality of analyses during the 60-min analysis period. Here, the focus is on 30-min ensemble forecasts initialized at the end of that period.

As in Part I, the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model is employed as a simplified cloud model at 2-km horizontal grid spacing. Various observation-space and state-space verification metrics, computed both for ensemble means and individual ensemble members, are employed to assess the quality of ensemble forecasts comparatively across cases. While the cases exhibit noticeable differences in predictability, the forecast skill in each case, as measured by various metrics, decays on a time scale of tens of minutes.