Predictability of the Strong Ural blocking Event in January 2012 in the Subseasonal to Seasonal Models of Europe and Canada

Abstract

The occurrence of a Ural blocking (UB) event is an important precursor of severe cold air outbreaks in Siberia and East Asia, and thus is significant to accurately predict UB events. Using subseasonal to seasonal (S2S) models of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and the Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC), we evaluated the predictability of a persistent UB event on 18 to 26 January 2012. Results showed that the ECCC model was superior to the ECMWF model in predicting the development stage of the UB event ten days in advance, while the ECMWF model had better predictions than the ECCC model for more than ten days in advance and the decaying stage of the UB event. By comparing the dynamic and thermodynamic evolution of the UB event predicted by the two models via the geostrophic vorticity tendency equation and temperature tendency equation, we found that the ECCC model better predicted the vertical vorticity advection, ageostrophic vorticity tendency, the tilting effect, horizontal temperature advection, and adiabatic heating during the development stage, whereas the ECMWF model better predicted the three dynamic and the two thermodynamic terms during the decaying stage. In addition, during both the development and decaying stages, the two models were good (bad) at predicting the vortex stretching term (horizontal vorticity advection), with the PCC between both the predictions and the observations larger (smaller) than +0.70 (+0.10) Thus, we suggest that the prediction of the persistent UB event in the S2S model might be improved by the better prediction of the horizontal vorticity advection.