Near‐surface wind profiles from numerical model predictions. Part II: Verifications against Australia‐wide surface wind observations

Abstract

The new scheme for deriving the near‐surface wind profiles discussed in Ma (in review) is applied to an Australian Bureau of Meteorology operational convective scale model over various domains. Both the new and conventional schemes' diagnostic 10‐m winds are then verified against Australia‐wide automatic weather station observations. Analyses of bulk statistics reveal that the new scheme's 10‐m wind forecasts have generally better accuracy than the current conventional scheme with a consistent reduction of biases over all domains. A widely recognised diurnal bias pattern of surface wind speed over the land is substantially reduced, and the inclusion of Ekman spiral effect on the 10‐m wind marginally improves statistics of the wind direction during the nighttime. The new scheme introduces no systemic bias, given the histogram of a bulk mean bias is analogiased to a Gaussian distribution, and moves the distribution of diagnostic wind speed closer to that observed.