WAFC London Performance Indicators

These plots show the performance of WAFC London forecasts produced by the Met Office in the United Kingdom.

Select the region and parameter then click the Go button
Region: Northern Hemisphere Tropics Southern Hemisphere North Atlantic - Area 2 Asia North Pacific Australia/NZ	Parameter: 250 hPa wind 250 hPa temperature

Wind and temperature

All the wind and temperature plots are for forecasts for 24 hours ahead at 00 and 12 UTC at a pressure level of 250 hPa, equivalent to Flight Level 340 or 34,000 feet.

The wind and temperature plots cover six different areas. Area 2 (Fig. 1) is a Met Office defined area, covering the north Atlantic and parts of western Europe and North America. We have a long time-series of data for this area which shows a steadily improving performance over the years.

Most of the remaining areas are defined by the World Meteorological Organization Commission for Basic Systems (CBS) to allow comparisons to be made between different modelling centres.

A new area covering the north Pacific, as defined by ICAO, has been set up. Historical data do not exist for this new area.

In both cases, the forecasts are compared against the model's analysis for the same time. For wind, the computed errors are root-mean-square vector errors - this takes into account errors in the wind direction as well as the wind speed. For temperature the errors are root-mean-square errors. The units are metres per second for wind (multiply by 1.94 to get knots) and Kelvin (or degrees Celsius) for temperature.

Timeliness