Probabilistic forecasting of the Arctic sea ice edge with contour modeling

DOI10.1214/20-AOAS1405zbMATH Open1478.62353arXiv1908.09377OpenAlexW3178393835MaRDI QIDQ2245147FDOQ2245147

Hannah M. Director, Adrian E. Raftery, Cecilia M. Bitz

Publication date: 15 November 2021

Published in: The Annals of Applied Statistics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: Sea ice, or frozen ocean water, freezes and melts every year in the Arctic. Forecasts of where sea ice will be located weeks to months in advance have become more important as the amount of sea ice declines due to climate change, for maritime planning and other uses. Typical sea ice forecasts are made with ensemble models, physics-based models of sea ice and the surrounding ocean and atmosphere. This paper introduces Mixture Contour Forecasting, a method to forecast sea ice probabilistically using a mixture of two distributions, one based on post-processed output from ensembles and the other on observed sea ice patterns in recent years. At short lead times, these forecasts are better calibrated than unadjusted dynamic ensemble forecasts and other statistical reference forecasts. To produce these forecasts, a statistical technique is introduced that directly models the sea ice edge contour, the boundary around the region that is ice-covered. Mixture Contour Forecasting and reference methods are evaluated for monthly sea ice forecasts for 2008-2016 at lead times ranging from 0.5-6.5 months using one of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts ensembles.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.09377

Recommendations

• A benchmark model for fixed-target Arctic sea ice forecasting
• Bayesian inference of spatio-temporal changes of arctic sea ice
• Modelling changes in Arctic sea ice cover: an application of generalized and inflated beta and gamma densities
• Estimating spatial changes over time of arctic sea ice using hidden \(2 \times 2\) tables
• Computer model calibration based on image warping metrics: an application for sea ice deformation

zbMATH Keywords

forecastingmixturesclimate changepostprocessingspatiotemporal

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Directional data; spatial statistics (62H11) Inference from spatial processes (62M30) Inference from stochastic processes and prediction (62M20) Applications of statistics to environmental and related topics (62P12) Climate science and climate modeling (86A08)

Cites Work

• Title not available (Why is that?)
• Probabilistic Forecasts, Calibration and Sharpness
• Strictly and non-strictly positive definite functions on spheres
• Excursion and Contour Uncertainty Regions for Latent Gaussian Models
• Bayesian inference of spatio-temporal changes of arctic sea ice
• Credible regions for exceedance sets of geostatistical data

Cited In (3)

• Probability assessments of an ice-free Arctic: comparing statistical and climate model projections
• A benchmark model for fixed-target Arctic sea ice forecasting
• Probabilistic forecasts of arctic sea ice thickness

Uses Software

• Rcpp
• rgeos
• tidyverse
• SEAS5

This page was built for publication: Probabilistic forecasting of the Arctic sea ice edge with contour modeling

Report a bug (only for logged in users!)Click here to report a bug for this page (MaRDI item Q2245147)