Improving forecasts of precipitation extremes over Northern and Central Italy using machine learning

Abstract

The accurate prediction of intense precipitation events is one of the main objectives of operational weather services. This task is even more relevant nowadays, with the rapid progression of global warming which intensifies these events. Numerical weather prediction models have improved continuously over time, providing uncertainty estimation with dynamical ensembles. However, direct precipitation forecasting is still challenging. Greater availability of machine learning tools paves the way to a hybrid forecasting approach, with the optimal combination of physical models, event statistics, and user-oriented post-processing. Here we describe a specific chain, based on a random forest pipeline, specialised in recognizing favourable synoptic conditions leading to precipitation extremes and subsequently classifying extremes into predefined types. The application focuses on Northern and Central Italy, taken as a testbed region, but is seamlessly extensible to other regions and timescales. The system is called MaLCoX (Machine Learning model predicting Conditions for eXtreme precipitation) and is running daily at the Italian regional weather service of ARPAE Emilia-Romagna. MalCoX has been trained with the ARCIS gridded high-resolution precipitation dataset as the target truth, using the last 20 years of the ECMWF re-forecast dataset as input predictors. We show that, with a long enough training period, the optimal blend of larger-scale information with direct model output improves the probabilistic forecast accuracy of extremes in the medium range. In addition, with specific methods, we provide a useful diagnostic to convey to forecasters the underlying physical storyline which makes a meteorological event extreme.