Analysis of the Factors that Led to Uncertainty of Track Forecast of Typhoon Krosa (2019) by 101-Member Ensemble Forecast Experiments Using NICAM

Abstract

Typhoon Krosa (2019) formed in the eastern part of the Philippine Sea and ~ 1400 km east of another typhoon, Lekima, on 6 August and made landfall in the western part of Japan's mainland on 15 August. The operational global model forecasts, which were initialized just after Krosa's formation, showed a very large uncertainty and completely failed to predict the actual track of Krosa. In this study, we investigated the causes of this large uncertainty through 101-member ensemble forecast experiments using a 28-km mesh global nonhydrostatic model. The experiments initialized at 1200 UTC 6 August showed a large uncertainty. An ensemble-based lagged correlation analysis indicated that the western North Pacific subtropical high (WNPSH) retreated further east in the members with large track forecast errors than in the members with small errors. For the members with a large track forecast error for Krosa, Krosa and Lekima approached each other by 250 km, and Krosa moved northward faster than the observation in 36 h from the initialization time. For the members with a small track forecast error for Krosa, the two typhoons approached each other by only 50 km, and the northward moving speed was comparable with that of the observation. The typhoon-center relative composite analysis exhibited that at the initialization time, the members with a large Krosa track forecast error had a larger horizontal size of Krosa, and the difference in Krosa's size was kept during the forecast period. This difference in size led to a stronger interaction between the two typhoons and the retreatment of the WNPSH, thus resulting in a fast northward moving speed for the members with a large Krosa track error.