Development of the Selected Multi-model Consensus Technique for the Tropical Cyclone Track Forecast in the Western North Pacific

A Selected Multi-model CONsensus (SMCON) technique was developed and verified for the tropical cyclone track forecast in the western North Pacific. The SMCON forecasts were produced by averaging numerical model forecasts showing low 70% latest 6 h prediction errors among 21 models. In the homogeneous comparison for 54 tropical cyclones in 2013 and 2014, the SMCON improvement rate was higher than the other forecasts such as the Non-Selected Multi-model CONsensus (NSMCON) and other numerical models (i.e., GDAPS, GEPS, GFS, HWRF, ECMWF, ECMWF_H, ECMWF_EPS, JGSM, TEPS). However, the SMCON showed lower or similar improvement rate than a few forecasts including ECMWF_EPS forecasts at 96 h in 2013 and at 72 h in 2014 and the TEPS forecast at 120 h in 2013. Mean track errors of the SMCON for two year were smaller than the NSMCON and these differences were 0.4, 1.2, 5.9, 12.9, 8.2 km at 24-, 48-, 72-, 96-, 120-h respectively. The SMCON error distributions showed smaller central tendency than the NSMCON's except 72-, 96-h forecasts in 2013. Similarly, the density for smaller track errors of the SMCON was higher than the NSMCON's except at 72-, 96-h forecast in 2013 in the kernel density estimation analysis. In addition, the NSMCON has lager range of errors above the third quantile and larger standard deviation than the SMCON's at 72-, 96-h forecasts in 2013. Also, the SMCON showed smaller bias than ECMWF_H for the cross track bias. Thus, we concluded that the SMCON could provide more reliable information on the tropical cyclone track forecast by reflecting the real-time performance of the numerical models.