MADCast global horizontal irradiance forecasts

Date(s) (Publication)
Distributor(s): Pedro Jimenez1 
Affiliation(s) 1 : National Center for Atmospheric Research
Version V 1.0
ID
Abstract Global horizontal irradiance (GHI) forecasts from a modified version of the MADcast model. MADCast initializes the cloud fraction using satellite retrievals and uses the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model to advect and diffuse the clouds. Our enhancements initialize the cloud hydrometeors from satellite retrievals (liquid, ice and snow) and advect and diffuse the hydrometeors using WRF. In this way, we are able to use the WRF shortwave parameterizations to provide the global horizontal irradiance predictions. The model is being run on an hourly basis providing a 6-hour forecasts over the contiguous U.S. Initial and boundary conditions are provided by the High Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) model. The initial cloud field is constrained using retrievals from GOES-16 to impose the cloud mask and the cloud top height, and METAR observations are used to impose the cloud base height. The forecasts files contain the instantaneous GHI every 15 min.

The MADCast model is described in Descombes, G., T. D. Auligne, H. -C. Lin, D. Xu, C. S. Schwartz, and F. Vandenberghe, 2014: Multi-sensor Advection Diffusion nowCast (MADCast) for cloud analysis and short-term prediction. NCAR Technical Note NCAR/TN-509+STR, 21 pp, doi:10.5065/D62V2D37.
Keywords MADCast, GHI, NASA, GOES-16, METAR, TDS, NetCDF, Contiguous U.S.A.
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Temporal Extent 2020-01-01 - 2021-01-31