arXiv subjects

Sarah Keeley

Publications and source records attributed to Sarah Keeley.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

The role of the oceans for subseasonal prediction: insights from eddy-permitting and eddy-rich coupled forecast systems

The oceans play a fundamental role in Earth's climate system, redistributing heat and influencing global and regional climate variability and predictability across weather and climate timescales. The benefits of ocean-atmosphere coupling for initialised predictions depend on the balance between improvements associated with more realistic air-sea interactions and dynamics, and degradations arising from the development of systematic biases at the coupling interface. Here, we draw on recent developments in modelling and data assimilation at ECMWF to revisit the role of ocean-atmosphere coupling in subseasonal predictions. In particular, we evaluate the impact of ocean-atmosphere coupling in 46-day reforecasts produced with the ECMWF Integrated Forecasting System (IFS) and explore the potential for improvements through increased horizontal resolution and a better representation of the ocean mesoscale. We find that ocean-atmosphere coupling significantly enhances ensemble forecast skill in the tropics, with positive effects increasing at longer lead times. In particular, Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) forecasts are substantially improved, with forecast skill extended by approximately 5 days compared to the uncoupled configuration. In contrast, ocean-atmosphere coupling has a more limited impact on the extratropical atmosphere at subseasonal timescales, with marginal impacts on the predictability of major tropospheric and stratospheric circulation indices. Finally, we present selected results from an experimental eddy-rich coupled configuration of the IFS, with a horizontal ocean resolution of approximately 8 km. We find that a better-resolved representation of the ocean mesoscale has a limited impact on atmospheric forecasts at subseasonal lead times, which suggests that many of the known deficiencies of the eddy-permitting reference configuration are mitigated by accurate initialisation.

physics.ao-ph↗

arXiv2026

Representing the Surface Ocean in ECMWF's data-driven forecasting system AIFS

Machine-learning (ML) models, such as the AIFS at the ECMWF, have revolutionised weather forecasting in recent years. We present an extension of the AIFS that jointly models the atmosphere and surface ocean, including ocean waves and sea ice. The primary objective of this extension is to enhance machine-learning medium-range forecasting and enable new use cases by expanding the weather state to better capture coupled surface processes. Our approach departs from traditional numerical models by not having two separate models for the atmosphere and marine components. The joint model instead learns correlations across the entire atmosphere-ocean interface in a component-agnostic way, and can exploit the expressive capacity of ML architectures to learn cross-component relationships directly from the data. We leverage tailored and targeted datasets and solve model design challenges such as missing values over land, multi-scale temporal dynamics, and physical realism of forecast fields and demonstrate the utility of loss scaling in guiding the learning process. We evaluate how representing the surface ocean affects medium-range weather forecasts. We also assess the model's ability to predict surface-ocean fields, including wave swell and tropical-cyclone cold wakes. For nearly all evaluated marine variables, we observe an improvement of approximately one day in forecast skill at medium-range lead times compared to physics-based models. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the model is robust to idealised initial conditions outside the training distribution and responds to them in a physically consistent way. Overall, our findings suggest that the joint AIFS modelling approach offers significant potential for combined atmosphere-ocean forecasting. Our work provides a solid foundation for future development of data-driven coupled Earth system models with greater flexibility and physical fidelity.

physics.ao-ph↗