SessionItem4-rev1.doc - WMO Severe Weather

FOR PARTICIPANTS ONLY

WRD/TC.36/1
December 2003

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ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL COMMISSION FOR ASIA AND THE PACIFIC (ESCAP)
AND
WORLD METEOROLOGICAL ORGANIZATION (WMO)



Typhoon Committee
Thirty-sixth Session
15-20 December 2003
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia











REVIEW OF THE COMMITTEE'S ACTIVITIES DURING 2003



(Item 4 of the Provisional Agenda)












_______________________

Report reproduced as submitted without editing
REVIEW OF THE COMMITTEE'S ACTIVITIES DURING 2003



Meteorological Component


In China, 126 new generation Doppler radars which have been named "CINRAD"
consist of the CHINA NEW GENERATIAON DOPPLER RADARS NETWORK. 52 CINRAD
radars have been established in China which were effective in observing
hail & rainstorm and monitoring typhoons. They have provided excellent
contribution to the disastrous weather prevention in many provinces.

In east-south China, the Wenzhou and the Ningbo radars monitored typhoons
successfully and made accurate forecasts. They have also provided excellent
contribution to the mitigation of disastrous weather prevention in Zhejiang
Province .

Up to end of this year, about 62 CINRAD radars will be erected in the
mainland. CMA plans to build 30 or so CINRAD radars next year .

582 Automatic Weather Stations (AWSs) were operational from Jan. 1, 2003,
which were established under the Automatic Atmosphere Monitoring System
project. Thus, about 746 AWSs operated by CMA has been operational by now.

In addition, the contract for establishment of about 850 AWSs has been
signed during 2003, and they are under construction. It is anticipated that
these AWSes will be operational in the next year; therefore, there will be
about 1584 AWSs operational at that time.

In 2003, the capability building of upper air sounding net in china is
continuously enhanced. 13 sets of L-band secondary wind-finding radar &
digital sonde system have been operated by August 1st, as a result, the
quality of sounding data at sites is obviously improved.

CMA developed the new Surface Meteorological Observing Practice which is
applicable not only to the automatic observing method but also to the
manual observing method. The practice has been reviewed by an expert team
on eleventh June 2003, and will be implemented from 1st January 2004.
According to the new practice, the new Operational Software of Surface
Meteorological Observation, which was named Version 2004, has been
developed as well during 2003. The new version of the Operational Software
of Surface Meteorological Observation will be tested and operational used
in the near future.

The Satellite based domestic telecommunication network is running stable.
There are 24 new PCVSAT receive-only stations installed, including the
station installed in Vietnam in July, 2003. Currently, the PCVSAT system
totally has 2440 remote stations, and its average daily broadcasting data
volume is over 1Gbytes.

Beijing-Offenbach GTS circuit was updated in April, 2003. The new link is
connected to the RMDCN of RA VI by using the Frame Relay service provided
by EQUANT, and has a CIR of 48Kbps. FTP is adopted to exchange data on the
new link. And, the backup link via Internet was established in 2002.

A High Performance Computer, IBM Regatta P670, including eight 1.1GHz
Power4 Processors and 8GB Memory card, has been installed in NMC on Dec
2002. The Peak Speed is about 35.2GFLOPS. The MTTP (Model for Typhoon Track
Prediction) on supercomputer SW was put into quasi-operational running this
year. The mean track errors for this year are shown as following.

|Time(h) |00 |12 |24 |36 |48 |
|Mean |74.7(123)|98.(113)|186.4(102)|269.6(91)|358.9(80)|
|errors(km) | | | | | |

The research work on using the new generation medium range forecast
model T213L31 has been carried out since last year. The real time
experimental forecast system was put into running since 13 June 2003, which
is run once a day and gives 4-day track forecast. The mean track errors up
to 25th Sept., 2003 are as following.


|Time(h) |Mean errors(km) |
|00 |40.5(40) |
|12 |73.8(39) |
|24 |130.5(37) |
|36 |183.7(35) |
|48 |240.3(32) |
|60 |280.5(28) |
|72 |320.7(20) |
|84 |360.1(17) |
|96 |459.3(13) |

In order to improve the instruction and service ability of operational
tropical cyclone forecasting, the National Meteorological Center (NMC) has
made the following adjustments to the forecasting from May 1, 2003:


As to the numbered tropical cyclones, 72-hour forecast for 00UTC,
06UTC, 12UTC, 18UTC cyclones and 24-hour forecast for 09UTC cyclones are
added.


As to the tropical cyclones that locate within 48-hour alert zone, the
tropical cyclones location forecasts are made at 00UTC, 06UTC, 12UTC, and
18UTC every day. For those have entered the 24-hour alert zone, 24-hour
forecast is added.

From July 1, 2003, the content of moving direction and velocity of next 12-
hour is added to the tropical cyclones forecast. The moving direction is
represented by English abbreviation of 16 orientations (N, NNE, NE, ENE...)
and the moving velocity is represented by speed value (e.g. 26KM/H). When
the cyclones maintain nearly static, these two items will be represented as
'ALMOST STATIONARY'.

By September this year, nine tropical cyclones (0216, 0218, 0220,
0307,0308,0309,0311,0312 and 0313) landed over coastal areas of China. The
24h, 48h and 72h mean distance prediction errors of NMC are about 113.5km,
191.8km and 309.9km.

In Hong Kong, to ensure uninterrupted reception of geostationary
satellite images after the decommissioning of GMS-5 in mid-2003, the
satellite reception system of the Hong Kong Observatory (HKO) was modified
to receive direct broadcast from GOES-9.

The HKO website continued to be the most popular means for the public
to access weather information directly. Radar images were made available
to the public starting from mid-2003. Over the 12 months ending September
2003, more than 300 million pages of information were retrieved by visitors
to the HKO website, a growth of nearly 85% as compared to that of the
previous year. During the passage of Typhoon Dujuan, a record daily high
figure of 9.7 million page views was recorded on 2 September 2003.

Web technology was widely employed to automate support operations in
Central Forecasting Office. A tropical cyclone information display tool,
the Tropical Cyclone Information Processing System (TIPS), was put into
operational use during the tropical cyclone (TC) season in 2003.

HKO extended the official TC position forecasts to 72 hours starting
from June 2003. The extended forecast is made available to other WMO
Members through the GTS. A multiple model ensemble technique based on the
global model forecasts from JMA, UK Met Office, NCEP and ECMWF was adopted
in operational tropical cyclone forecasting in 2003. Moreover, by courtesy
of the ECMWF, EPS meteograms at two grid points in the vicinity of Hong
Kong were made available to HKO between January and October 2003.

The infrared Doppler Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) system
installed at Hong Kong International Airport (HKIA) was found to be very
useful in monitoring windshear around the airport under non-rainy weather.
The third weather buoy at HKIA was installed in January 2003. Moreover, a
wind profiler was installed at Cheung Chau in June 2003 to monitor the
airflow upstream of the Lantau Island, a hilly island south of HKIA. This
wind profiler was the fourth of its kind established in Hong Kong.

The forecast range of the 60-km resolution Operational Regional
Spectral Model (ORSM) were extended from 48 hours to 72 hours. The
forecast range of the 20-km resolution ORSM was also extended from 24 hours
to 42 hours. A rapidly updating local analysis system, which was adapted
from the Local Analysis and Prediction System (LAPS) originally developed
by the Forecast Systems Laboratory (FSL) of NOAA, was put into trial
operation at 10-km, 5-km and 1-km resolution for nowcasting purpose. It
helped to analyze the structure of tropical cyclones in the vicinity of
Hong Kong and to enhance the capability in rainstorm nowcasting.

The feasibility of operating a local non-hydrostatic model continued
to be explored. In addition to the operational trial of the Advanced
Regional Prediction System (ARPS) running at 6-km resolution, JMA's non-
hydrostatic model was also being adapted with a resolution of 1-km.

In Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the amount of the data from
the VSAT communication was increased by almost three times than before and
used in operation and research studies. The reception from GMS-5 was
replaced to the one from FY-2B. The reception from NOAA- 16 was newly
started and the one from NOAA-17 is now on test. The resolution of the NWP
models was improved from 50km to 30km in the meso-scale model and from 70km
to 50km in the regional spectral model. The new method of making the
initial filed using TC Bogus was developed and put into operatio