Skill assessment of sub-seasonal 2-m temperature forecasts for Helsinki, Finland

Sub-seasonal to seasonal scale forecasts provide useful information for city authorities for operational planning, preparedness and maintenance costs optimization. In the EU H2020 E-SHAPE project the Finnish Meteorological Institute aims at developing an operational service providing user-oriented sub-seasonal and seasonal forecast products for the City of Helsinki tailored for winter maintenance activities. To be able to provide skilful sub-seasonal to seasonal forecasts products, bias adjustment and evaluation of the used weather parameters, i.e. temperature and snow is crucial. 

In this study, we focus on the skill assessment of sub-seasonal temperature forecasts in Helsinki, Finland, experimenting with various methods to adjust the bias from the raw temperature forecasts. Due to its coastal location, skilful forecasting of temperatures for Helsinki is challenging. The temperature gradient on the coastline is especially strong during spring when inland areas warm considerably faster than the coastline. Therefore, raw point forecasts for Helsinki suffer from cold bias during the March-July period.

We use the 2 m temperature extended-range reforecasts obtained from the ECMWF S2S database and apply two bias adjustment techniques: removing the mean bias and the quantile mapping method. Reforecasts for a 20-years period, 2000-2019 with 10 ensemble members, run twice a week for 46 days ahead were calibrated and evaluated. Two datasets are used as reference, observations from Helsinki Kaisaniemi weather station and gridded ERA5 reanalysis data. Thus, these combinations yield in total five sets of forecasts which are evaluated against the observations.

The results of the experiments and the potential added value of bias correction will be presented for discussion. Based on the preliminary results, especially the cold bias in spring and early summer can be improved with the bias-correction methods. The bias-adjusted extended-range temperature forecasts are used in the development of sub-seasonal winter forecast products tailored for the needs of city maintenance.