Universiẗat, Diss., 2000--München.

Diss. no. 11627 nat. sc. SFIT Zürich. / Erschienen auch als: Publication no. 56 of the Swiss Meteorological Institute. Literaturverz.

Universiẗat, Diss., 2003--Kassel.

The Mediterranean region frequently experiences extreme precipitation events (EPEs) with devastating consequences for affected societies, economies, and environment. Thus, it is crucial to better understand their characteristics and drivers and improve their predictions at longer lead times. This work provides new insights about the spatiotemporal dependencies of EPEs in the region. It, moreover, implements Empirical Orthogonal Function analysis and subsequent non-hierarchical Kmeans clustering for generating nine distinct weather patterns over the domain, referred to as “Mediterranean patterns”. These patterns are significantly associated with EPEs across the region, and in fact, can be used to extend the forecasting horizon of EPEs. This is demonstrated considering modelled data for all the domain, but also using observational data for Calabria, southern Italy, an area of complex topography that increases the challenges of weather prediction. The results suggest preferential techniques for improving EPEs predictions for short, medium, and extended range forecasts, supporting thus the mitigation of their negative impacts.

Die Veröffentlichung dokumentiert die Ergebnisse eines Forschungsprojektes, in dem untersucht wurde, welchen Einfluss großräumige Strömungsmuster in der Atmosphäre (Großwetterlagen) auf das Auftreten von Wetterextremen in Sachsen hatten und zukünftig haben können. Dafür wurde ein Verfahren zur Klassifikation durch multiple Regression entwickelt und angewendet. Belastbare Zunahmen von Wetterextremen sind z. B. bei heißen und niederschlagsarmen warmen Tagen sowie etwas weniger sicher bei Schwüle und Starkwind im Winterhalbjahr zu erwarten. Die Veröffentlichung richtet sich an Klimaforscher, -modellentwickler und -modellanwender.

Aus der Einleitung: The calculation and prediction of river flow is a very old problem. Especially extremely high values of the runoff can cause enormous economic damage. A system which precisely predicts the runoff and warns in case of a flood event can prevent a high amount of the damages. On the basis of a good flood forecast, one can take action by preventive methods and warnings. An efficient constructional flood retention can reduce the effects of a flood event enormously.With a precise runoff prediction with longer lead times (>48h), the dam administration is enabled to give order to their gatekeepers to empty dams and reservoirs very fast, following a smart strategy. With a good timing, that enables the dams later to store and retain the peak of the flood and to reduce all effects of damage in the downstream. A warning of people in possible flooded areas with greater lead time, enables them to evacuate not fixed things like cars, computers, important documents and so on. Additionally it is possible to use the underlying rainfall-runoff model to perform runoff simulations to find out which areas are threatened at which precipitation events and associated runoff in the river. Altogether these methods can avoid a huge amount of economic damage.

Ensembles are today routinely applied to estimate uncertainty in numerical predictions of complex systems such as the weather. Instead of initializing a single numerical forecast, using only the best guess of the present state as initial conditions, a collection (an ensemble) of forecasts whose members start from slightly different initial conditions is calculated. By varying the initial conditions within their error bars, the sensitivity of the resulting forecasts to these measurement errors can be accounted for. The ensemble approach can also be applied to estimate forecast errors that are due to insufficiently known model parameters by varying these parameters between ensemble members. An important (and difficult) question in ensemble weather forecasting is how well does an ensemble of forecasts reproduce the actual forecast uncertainty. A widely used criterion to assess the quality of forecast ensembles is statistical consistency which demands that the ensemble members and the corresponding measurement (the ``verification\'\') behave like random independent draws from the same underlying probability distribution. Since this forecast distribution is generally unknown, such an analysis is nontrivial. An established criterion to assess statistical consistency of a historical archive of scalar ensembles and verifications is uniformity of the verification rank: If the verification falls between the (k-1)-st and k-th largest ensemble member it is said to have rank k. Statistical consistency implies that the average frequency of occurrence should be the same for each rank. A central result of the present thesis is that, in a statistically consistent K-member ensemble, the (K+1)-dimensional vector of rank probabilities is a random vector that is uniformly distributed on the K-dimensional probability simplex. This behavior is universal for all possible forecast distributions. It thus provides a way to describe forecast ensembles in a nonparametric way, without making any assumptions about the statistical behavior of the ensemble data. The physical details of the forecast model are eliminated, and the notion of statistical consistency is captured in an elementary way. Two applications of this result to ensemble analysis are presented. Ensemble stratification, the partitioning of an archive of ensemble forecasts into subsets using a discriminating criterion, is considered in the light of the above result. It is shown that certain stratification criteria can make the individual subsets of ensembles appear statistically inconsistent, even though the unstratified ensemble is statistically consistent. This effect is explained by considering statistical fluctuations of rank probabilities. A new hypothesis test is developed to assess statistical consistency of stratified ensembles while taking these potentially misleading stratification effects into account. The distribution of rank probabilities is further used to study the predictability of outliers, which are defined as events where the verification falls outside the range of the ensemble, being either smaller than the smallest, or larger than the largest ensemble member. It is shown that these events are better predictable than by a naive benchmark prediction, which unconditionally issues the average outlier frequency of 2/(K+1) as a forecast. Predictability of outlier events, quantified in terms of probabilistic skill scores and receiver operating characteristics (ROC), is shown to be universal in a hypothetical forecast ensemble. An empirical study shows that in an operational temperature forecast ensemble, outliers are likewise predictable, and that the corresponding predictability measures agree with the analytically calculated ones.

Die Veröffentlichung dokumentiert die Ergebnisse eines Forschungsprojektes, in dem untersucht wurde, welchen Einfluss großräumige Strömungsmuster in der Atmosphäre (Großwetterlagen) auf das Auftreten von Wetterextremen in Sachsen hatten und zukünftig haben können. Dafür wurde ein Verfahren zur Klassifikation durch multiple Regression entwickelt und angewendet. Belastbare Zunahmen von Wetterextremen sind z. B. bei heißen und niederschlagsarmen warmen Tagen sowie etwas weniger sicher bei Schwüle und Starkwind im Winterhalbjahr zu erwarten. Die Veröffentlichung richtet sich an Klimaforscher, -modellentwickler und -modellanwender.

Ensembles are today routinely applied to estimate uncertainty in numerical predictions of complex systems such as the weather. Instead of initializing a single numerical forecast, using only the best guess of the present state as initial conditions, a collection (an ensemble) of forecasts whose members start from slightly different initial conditions is calculated. By varying the initial conditions within their error bars, the sensitivity of the resulting forecasts to these measurement errors can be accounted for. The ensemble approach can also be applied to estimate forecast errors that are due to insufficiently known model parameters by varying these parameters between ensemble members. An important (and difficult) question in ensemble weather forecasting is how well does an ensemble of forecasts reproduce the actual forecast uncertainty. A widely used criterion to assess the quality of forecast ensembles is statistical consistency which demands that the ensemble members and the corresponding measurement (the ``verification\'\') behave like random independent draws from the same underlying probability distribution. Since this forecast distribution is generally unknown, such an analysis is nontrivial. An established criterion to assess statistical consistency of a historical archive of scalar ensembles and verifications is uniformity of the verification rank: If the verification falls between the (k-1)-st and k-th largest ensemble member it is said to have rank k. Statistical consistency implies that the average frequency of occurrence should be the same for each rank. A central result of the present thesis is that, in a statistically consistent K-member ensemble, the (K+1)-dimensional vector of rank probabilities is a random vector that is uniformly distributed on the K-dimensional probability simplex. This behavior is universal for all possible forecast distributions. It thus provides a way to describe forecast ensembles in a nonparametric way, without making any assumptions about the statistical behavior of the ensemble data. The physical details of the forecast model are eliminated, and the notion of statistical consistency is captured in an elementary way. Two applications of this result to ensemble analysis are presented. Ensemble stratification, the partitioning of an archive of ensemble forecasts into subsets using a discriminating criterion, is considered in the light of the above result. It is shown that certain stratification criteria can make the individual subsets of ensembles appear statistically inconsistent, even though the unstratified ensemble is statistically consistent. This effect is explained by considering statistical fluctuations of rank probabilities. A new hypothesis test is developed to assess statistical consistency of stratified ensembles while taking these potentially misleading stratification effects into account. The distribution of rank probabilities is further used to study the predictability of outliers, which are defined as events where the verification falls outside the range of the ensemble, being either smaller than the smallest, or larger than the largest ensemble member. It is shown that these events are better predictable than by a naive benchmark prediction, which unconditionally issues the average outlier frequency of 2/(K+1) as a forecast. Predictability of outlier events, quantified in terms of probabilistic skill scores and receiver operating characteristics (ROC), is shown to be universal in a hypothetical forecast ensemble. An empirical study shows that in an operational temperature forecast ensemble, outliers are likewise predictable, and that the corresponding predictability measures agree with the analytically calculated ones.

Aus der Einleitung: The calculation and prediction of river flow is a very old problem. Especially extremely high values of the runoff can cause enormous economic damage. A system which precisely predicts the runoff and warns in case of a flood event can prevent a high amount of the damages. On the basis of a good flood forecast, one can take action by preventive methods and warnings. An efficient constructional flood retention can reduce the effects of a flood event enormously.With a precise runoff prediction with longer lead times (>48h), the dam administration is enabled to give order to their gatekeepers to empty dams and reservoirs very fast, following a smart strategy. With a good timing, that enables the dams later to store and retain the peak of the flood and to reduce all effects of damage in the downstream. A warning of people in possible flooded areas with greater lead time, enables them to evacuate not fixed things like cars, computers, important documents and so on. Additionally it is possible to use the underlying rainfall-runoff model to perform runoff simulations to find out which areas are threatened at which precipitation events and associated runoff in the river. Altogether these methods can avoid a huge amount of economic damage.:List of Symbols and Abbreviations S. III 1 Introduction S. 1 2 Process based Rainfall-Runoff Modelling S. 5 2.1 Basics of runoff processes S. 5 2.2 Physically based rainfall-runoff and hydrodynamic river models S. 15 3 Portraying Rainfall-Runoff Processes with Neural Networks S. 21 3.1 The Challenge in General S. 22 3.2 State-of-the-art Approaches S. 24 3.3 Architectures of neural networks for time series prediction S. 26 4 Requirements specification S. 33 5 The PAI-OFF approach as the base of the system S. 35 5.1 Pre-Processing of the Input Data S. 37 5.2 Operating and training the PoNN S. 47 5.3 The PAI-OFF approach - an Intelligent System S. 52 6 Design and Implementation S. 55 6.1 Design S. 55 6.2 Implementation S. 58 6.3 Exported interface definition S. 62 6.4 Displaying output data with involvement of uncertainty S. 64 7 Results and Discussion S. 69 7.1 Evaluation of the Results S. 69 7.2 Discussion of the achieved state S. 75 8 Conclusion and FutureWork S. 77 8.1 Access to real-time meteorological input data S. 77 8.2 Using further developed prediction methods S. 79 8.3 Development of a graphical user interface S. 80 Bibliography S. 83