NOAA/ESRL Homepage for Chris Anderson
Professional Information
Lead Modeler, NOAA/ESRL/GSD/FAB
Curriculum Vita
Publications
How we serve the NOAA/ESRL mission to understand, observe, and predict Earth systems
Predictions of Local Weather Conditions for Government Agencies
We have developed software to perform gridded analysis and NWP of local weather conditions. Our software has been applied with grid point spacing as fine as 1-km to short-term weather forecasting problems in operational and research settings. Some of our projects are listed below.
National Weather Service, Boulder, Colorado
We provide hourly gridded analysis and NWP forecasts out to 24-hours for the NWS forecast office in Boulder, Colorado
Range Standardization and Automation Project
Our customized MM5 forecast system provides guidance for the US Air Force launch command, who need precise, local forecasts of winds, clouds, lightning, and fog.
Taiwan Central Weather Bureau
The Taiwan Central Weather Bureau has the unenviable task of providing weather forecasts and warnings of inclement weather for an island born of volcanoes and affected by Typhoons and intense Tropical storms. We provide techinical expertise in support of their operational use of the Weather Research and Forecasting Model with emphasis on quantitative precipitation forecasts.
NOAA Hydrometeorological Testbed
The goal of the NOAA Hydrometeorological Testbed is to accelerate the infusion of new technologies, models and scientific results from the research community into daily forecasting operations of the National Weather Service and its River Forecast Centers. We have emphasized techniques that generate probabilistic quantitative precipitation forecasts. We use multiple model ensembles with each ensemble member configured to resolve detailed local weather conditions. We post-process ensemble model output with statistical tools in the event that model output contains biases. By using high-resolution NWP forecasts and focusing on heavy rain events, the statistical corrections are less complicated, so that we have achieved accurate and detailed probablistic precipitation forecasts with a small data set.
Climatologies of Local Weather to Support Government Decisions
Assessment of Weather Extremes in Climate Projections
Will portions of the United States experience more frequent droughts? Will droughts become more intense or longer-lived? Will flash-floods become more frequent? Droughts and flash floods are costly. It is worth asking whether segments of the U. S. population will become at greater risk for incurring costs related to these natural disasters. We are analyzing output as a participant in the 4th Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the North American Regional Climate Change Assessment Project . Data from global and regional climate models will be examined for potential changes in the conditions that lead to droughts and flash floods and their frequency and intensity, using, where appropriate, the high-resolution NWP and statistical post-processing tools developed for weather prediction applications.
Diagnoses of Mechanisms of a "warming hole" in the United States
Since the 1970s, temperature has trended upwards over much of the United States, but not in the central and southeastern United States. Maximum temprature and precipitation are inversely related, so that a large reason why maximum temperature hasn't trended upwards is that precipitation has. The forcing mechanisms of the increasing trend in precipitation are processes that have temporal scales of decades to hours. The mechanisms creating these trends are being explored. This research requires high-resolution climate models to fully resolve all processes. In addition, as in the assessment of weather extremes, climate projections will be examined to determine what approaches may be used to reliably simulate this feature and whether it could continue as greenhouse gase concentrations increase.
Background Information on the Tools I Use
NWP for Local Weather Forecasts
My interest in NWP grew from a desire to learn the mechanisms of thunderstorms and severe weather. NWP for weather forecasts is often thought of as applied science. However, sciences seek to answer three questions that lead into each other:
What is it?
How does it work?
What can we predict?
The ability to predict, therefore, is the hallmark of a very mature science. NWP has reached that level of science in some ways. There is still quite a bit of work yet to be done for local weather forecasts in particular. Read about the fundamentals of NWP used in weather forecasting or browse websites with forecasting information.
Regional Climate Analysis and Simulation
Local climatologies are influenced by local terrain and local weather processes. Global climate models are incapable of simulating such details due to the computational power that is needed to do so. However, as our society becomes more aware of the impact of climate on our economic and production systems and human wellfare, it is necessary to provide local climatological information from climate models in order to develop sophisticated management decisions that consider potential losses or gains incurred by climate variability and climate change.