Operational Consensus Forecasts

Abstract

The objective consensus forecasting (OCF) system is an automated operational forecasting system that adapts to underlying numerical model upgrades within 30 days and generally outperforms direct model output (DMO) and model output statistics (MOS) forecasts. It employs routinely available DMO and MOS guidance combined after bias correction using a mean absolute error (MAE)-weighted average algorithm. OCF generates twice-daily forecasts of screen-level temperature maxima and minima, ground-level temperature minima, evaporation, sunshine hours, and rainfall and its probability for day 0 to day 6 for up to 600 Australian sites. Extensive real-time trials of temperature forecasts yielded MAEs at days 0?2 about 40% lower than those from its component MOS and DMO forecasts. MAEs were also lower at day 1 than matching official forecasts of maxima and minima by 8% and 10% and outperformed official forecasts at over 71% and 75% of sites, respectively. MAEs of weighted average consensus outperformed simple average forecasts by about 5%.