Probabilistic Forecast of Visibility at Gimpo, Incheon, and Jeju International Airports Using Weighted Model Averaging

Abstract

In this study, weighted model averaging (WMA) was applied to calibrating ensemble forecasts generated using Limited-area ENsemble prediction System (LENS). WMA is an easy-to-implement post-processing technique that assigns a greater weight to the ensemble member forecast that exhibits better performance; it is used to provide probabilistic visibility forecasting in the form of a predictive probability density function for ensembles. The predictive probability density function is a mixture of discrete point mass and two-sided truncated normal distribution components. Observations were obtained at Gimpo, Incheon, and Jeju International Airports, and 13 ensemble member forecasts were obtained using LENS, for the period of December 2018 to June 2019. Prior to applying WMA, a reliability analysis was conducted using rank histograms and reliability diagrams to identify the statistical consistency between the ensembles and the corresponding observations. The WMA method was then applied to each raw ensemble model, and a weighted predictive probability density function was proposed. Performances were evaluated using the mean absolute error, the continuous ranked probability score, the Brier score, and the probability integral transform. The results showed that the proposed method provided improved performance compared with the raw ensembles, indicating that the raw ensembles were well calibrated using the predicted probability density function.