Hurricane Beryl, a strong but small-scale Atlantic hurricane moving across the northwestern Caribbean Sea, experienced rapid intensification to a Category 5 hurricane this week, making Beryl the earliest observed Category 5 hurricane in the Atlantic.
The ECMWF operational forecasts at 9 km resolution began capturing the system on 29 June at 00 UTC and captured the development of the early stages of the hurricane, in terms of track, but it considerably underestimated its intensity. The predictions for the cyclone's intensity, in terms of minimum mean sea-level pressure and wind strength, as Beryl approached North Grenada, were better represented from the very early stages in the 4.4 km prototype simulations of the Destination Earth Weather-induced extremes Digital Twin. An example is shown with the #DestinE simulation at 4.4 km and the control of our operational ECMWF ensemble forecasts, initialised on 30 June at 00 UTC.
The simulation of Hurricane Beryl, which is a small-scale system, illustrates that enhancing horizontal resolution and resolving more convective processes can bring significant benefits to predicting certain extreme weather events.
In the #DestinationEarth initiative of the European Commission, ECMWF, together with partners from national weather services and academia across Europe, is developing a #DigitalTwin focused on weather-induced extreme events. This digital twin has a global component, developed by ECMWF using its #IntegratedForecastingSystem at a resolution of 4.4 km, and a regional component allowing users to zoom over Europe at resolutions of a few hundred metres, developed by a European partnership led by Météo-France.
The evaluation of prototype simulations of the global component of this Weather-induced Digital twin, which are initialised daily and run for 4 days ahead, has already demonstrated significant improvements in forecasting capabilities for several types of extreme events over the past two years.
For more information ➡️ https://lnkd.in/ecg_cCBC
Captions: Animation shows the location of the storm centre could be forecasted well in advance with DestinE's 4.4 km forecast initialised on 30 June at 00 UTC. Shown are the first 120 hours of the forecast. The simulated reflectance at one wavelength shows the storm with surrounding cloud bands, cells with shallow convective clouds further east and deep convective clouds forming above the Amazonian rain forest south of the hurricane.
Figure shows mean sea-level pressure field of Tropical Cyclone Beryl in the ECMWF Control-ENS (blue) and Destination Earth (red) in the left plot of the panel. The black hourglass indicates the location of the TC centre at the same valid time. The shaded plot on the right of the panel shows the 10m wind speed in the ECMWF Control-ENS (left) and DestinE (right). The forecast is initialised on 30 June 2024 at 00 UTC, valid on 1 July 2024 at 15 UTC (forecast at T+39h).
