Ensemble forecasting

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Ensemble forecasting is a method used by modern operational forecast centers to account for uncertainties and errors in the forecasting system which are crucial for the prediction errors due to the chaotic nature of the atmospheric dynamics (sensitive dependency on initial conditions). Many different models are created in parallel with slightly different initial conditions or configurations. These models are then combined to produce a forecast that can be fully probabilistic or derive some deterministic products such as the ensemble mean.

There are various ways of viewing the data such as Spaghetti Plots, ensemble means or Postage Stamps where a number of different results from the models run can be compared.

[edit] See also

• Chaos theory
• Ensemble Kalman filter
• Forecasting
• Probabilistic forecasting