Robust weather-adaptive post-processing using model output statistics random forests

Abstract

Physical numerical weather prediction models have biases and miscalibrations that can depend on the weather situation, which makes it difficult to post-process them effectively using the traditional model output statistics (MOS) framework based on parametric regression models. Consequently, much recent work has focused on using flexible machine learning methods that are able to take additional weather-related predictors into account during post-processing beyond the forecast of the variable of interest only. Some of these methods have achieved impressive results, but they typically require significantly more training data than traditional MOS and are less straightforward to implement and interpret. We propose MOS random forests, a new post-processing method that avoids these problems by fusing traditional MOS with a powerful machine learning method called random forests to estimate weather-adapted MOS coefficients from a set of predictors. Since the assumed parametric base model contains valuable prior knowledge, much smaller training data sizes are required to obtain skillful forecasts, and model results are easy to interpret. MOS random forests are straightforward to implement and typically work well, even with no or very little hyperparameter tuning. For the difficult task of post-processing daily precipitation sums in complex terrain, they outperform reference machine learning methods at most of the stations considered. Additionally, the method is highly robust in relation to changes in data size and works well even when less than 100 observations are available for training.