A comparison of wind products in the context of ENSO
prediction
Abstract
Four different wind products are evaluated in terms of their application
to ENSO prediction. These wind products have been used to initialize an
intermediate ocean-atmosphere coupled model for monthly retrospective
forecasts from 1980 to 2002. The wind product that includes satellite
scatterometer data has the highest scores, with the NCEP reanalysis and
the new FSU objective analysis closely behind. The latter is a major
improvement over the old FSU subjective analysis which has some serious
problems in recent years. It seems that the wind products from remote
sensing, in-situ observation and model reanalysis are all useful for
ENSO prediction. At present, an ensemble of forecasts initialized with
various wind data sets is probably our best bet.
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