Open AccessExcessive rainfall over the Belgian Ardennes in December 1993: Evaluation of model predictions
Author(s) -
Van Meijgaard Erik
Publication year - 1995
Publication title -
meteorological applications
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.672
H-Index - 59
eISSN - 1469-8080
pISSN - 1350-4827
DOI - 10.1002/met.5060020107
Subject(s) - precipitation , environmental science , climatology , flooding (psychology) , quantitative precipitation forecast , climate model , meteorology , climate change , geography , geology , psychology , psychotherapist , oceanography
December 1993 turned out to be very wet on the European continent. Around 20 December the Meuse basin in Belgium and France was hit by an unusual amount of precipitation, which gave rise to extensive flooding of the Meuse in the Dutch province of Limburg. For a 33‐day period starting on 6 December 1993 the precipitation forecasts for the Belgian Ardennes were evaluated using the observations of 20 Belgian climate stations. Besides short‐term forecasts made with regional models like the HIRLAM, level 2.0, the UKMO‐model and the RACMO/HIRHAM, precipitation prognoses extracted from ECWMF‐forecasts were examined. On average all model predictions were too low, varying from 10% for the 36‐ to 60‐hour (day‐2) ECMWF‐forecast to over 50% for the 6‐ to 30‐hour UKMO‐forecast. On the other hand, the UKMO‐forecast correlated best with the observations (0.85). The rainfall on 20 December, the wettest day, was underestimated by all model predictions, with the exception of the day‐2 ECMWF‐forecast. With the RACMO/HIRHAM a three‐day rerun was made starting from the 1200 UTC ECMWF‐analysis on 18 December 1993. The resulting precipitation on 20 December compared very well with the data. A similarly prepared HIRLAM‐run, however, performed worse compared with the operational run.