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Abstract Current numerical weather prediction models show limited skill in predicting low-latitude precipitation. To aid future improvements, be it with better dynamical or statistical models, we propose a well-defined benchmark forecast. We use the arguably best currently high-resolution, gauge-calibrated, gridded precipitation product, the Integrated Multi-Satellite Retrievals for GPM (Global Precipitation Measurement) (IMERG) “final run” in a ± 15-day window around the date of interest to build an empirical climatological ensemble forecast. This window size is an optimal compromise between statistical robustness and flexibility to represent seasonal changes. We refer to this benchmark as Extended Probabilistic Climatology (EPC) and compute it on a 0.1°×0.1° grid for 40°S–40°N and the period 2001–2019. In order to reduce and standardize information, a mixed Bernoulli-Gamma distribution is fitted to the empirical EPC, which hardly affects predictive performance. The EPC is then compared to 1-day ensemble predictions from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) using standard verification scores. With respect to rainfall amount, ECMWF performs only slightly better than EPS over most of the low latitudes and worse over high-mountain and dry oceanic areas as well as over tropical Africa, where the lack of skill is also evident in independent station data. For rainfall occurrence, EPC is superior over most oceanic, coastal, and mountain regions, although the better potential predictive ability of ECMWF indicates that this is mostly due to calibration problems. To encourage the use of the new benchmark, we provide the data, scripts, and an interactive webtool to the scientific community.
Walz et al. (Wed,) studied this question.