Deutscher Wetterdienst, Research and Development - Germany
The paper investigates the early warning capabilities of the global model GME of the Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD) for the case of a storm in the western Mediterranean Sea.
On 10 and 11 November 2001 a storm with record amounts of precipitation and high winds raged the western Mediterranean. The Balearic Islands and the Algerian coast were hardest hit. The storm was predicted several days in advance by the GME model, though the forecasted sea surface pressure minimum was too low.
Several forecasts are compared. The model is initialised with different analyses: The routine analysis of DWD and the IFS analysis of ECMWF.
Also, the horizontal resolution is doubled. GME is an icosahedral-hexagonal grid point model with an almost uniform spatial resolution across the globe. The operational model employs a resolution of approximately 60 km. New calculations are made with a resolution of 30 km and compared with the routine runs.
In a companion paper J.-P. Schulz uses boundary data from GME to make high resolution simulations of this storm with the limited area model LM of DWD.