ENVIRONMENT CANADA'S EXPERIMENTAL NUMERICAL WEATHER PREDICTION SYSTEMS FOR THE VANCOUVER 2010 WINTER OLYMPIC AND PARALYMPIC GAMES

Environment Canada has developed the experimental numerical weather prediction (NWP) systems for the Vancouver 2010 Games, which includes a regional ensemble prediction system (REPS), a high-resolution deterministic prediction system, and an external land surface modeling system. The real-time mesoscale numerical modeling was done using the fifth-generation Pennsylvania State University (PSU), National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Mesoscale Model (MM5). The ARPA Piemonte Italian Weather Service developed an advanced system combining a very dense weather-observing network, high-resolution numerical modeling, and a distributed weather office network with well-trained forecasters. A regional ensemble prediction system (REPS) has been developed for probabilistic short-range weather forecasting, which is based on the limited-area version of the Global Environmental Multiscale Model (GEM-LAM). The REPS is dependent on the Canadian Meteorological Center (CMC) operational global ensemble prediction system (EPS).