Multi‐diagnostic multi‐model ensemble forecasts of aviation turbulence

Turbulence is one of the major weather hazards to aviation. Studies have shown that clear‐air turbulence may well occur more frequently with future climate change. Currently the two World Area Forecast Centres use deterministic models to generate forecasts of turbulence. It has been shown that the use of multi‐model ensembles can lead to more skilful turbulence forecasts. It has also been shown that the combination of turbulence diagnostics can also produce more skilful forecasts using deterministic models. This study puts the two approaches together to expand the range of diagnostics to include predictors of both convective and mountain wave turbulence, in addition to clear‐air turbulence, using two ensemble model systems. Results from a 12 month global trial from September 2016 to August 2017 show the increased skill and economic value of including a wider range of diagnostics in a multi‐diagnostic multi‐model ensemble

A modified principal component technique based on the LASSO

In many multivariate statistical techniques, a set of linear functions of the original p variables is produced. One of the more difŽ cult aspects of these techniques is the interpretation of the linear functions, as these functions usually have nonzero coefŽ cients on all p variables.A common approach is to effectively ignore (treat as zero) any coefŽ cients less than some threshold value, so that the function becomes simple and the interpretation becomes easier for the users. Such a procedure can be misleading.There are alternatives to principal component analysis which restrict the coefficients to a smaller number of possible values in the derivationof the linear functions,or replace the principal components by “principal variables.” This article introduces a new technique, borrowing an idea proposed by Tibshirani in the context of multiple regressionwhere similar problemsarise in interpreting regression equations. This approach is the so-called LASSO, the “least absolute shrinkage and selection operator,” in which a bound is introduced on the sum of the absolute values of the coefficients, and in which some coefficients consequently become zero.We explore some of the propertiesof the newtechnique,both theoreticallyand using simulationstudies, and apply it to an example

On the suitability of combining feature selection and resampling to manage data complexity

The effectiveness of a learning task depends on data com- plexity (class overlap, class imbalance, irrelevant features, etc.). When more than one complexity factor appears, two or more preprocessing techniques should be applied. Nevertheless, no much effort has been de- voted to investigate the importance of the order in which they can be used. This paper focuses on the joint use of feature reduction and bal- ancing techniques, and studies which could be the application order that leads to the best classification results. This analysis was made on a spe- cific problem whose aim was to identify the melodic track given a MIDI file. Several experiments were performed from different imbalanced 38- dimensional training sets with many more accompaniment tracks than melodic tracks, and where features were aggregated without any correla- tion study. Results showed that the most effective combination was the ordered use of resampling and feature reduction techniques

Multi-model ensemble predictions of aviation turbulence

Turbulence remains one of the leading causes of aviation incidents. Climate change is predicted to increase the occurrence of Clear‐Air Turbulence (CAT), and therefore forecasting turbulence will become more important in the future. Currently the two World Area Forecast Centres (WAFCs) use deterministic numerical weather prediction models to predict clear‐air turbulence operationally, it has been shown that ensemble forecasts improve the forecast skill of traditional meteorological variables. This study applies multi‐model ensemble forecasting to aviation turbulence for the first time. It is shown in a 12‐month global trial from May 2016 to April 2017, that combining two different ensembles yields a similar forecast skill to a single model ensemble, and yields an improvement in forecast value at low cost/loss ratios. This finding is consistent with previous work showing that the use of ensembles in turbulence forecasting is beneficial. Using a multi‐model approach is an effective way to improve the forecast skill and provide pilots and flight planners with more information about the forecast confidence, allowing them to make a more informed decision about what action needs to be taken, such as diverting around the turbulence or requiring passengers and flight attendants to be seatbelted. The multi‐model ensemble approach is intended to be made operational by both WAFCs in the near future and this study lays the foundations to make this possible

Assessing the reliability of ensemble forecasting systems under serial dependence

The problem of testing the reliability of ensemble forecasting systems is revisited. A popular tool to assess the reliability of ensemble forecasting systems (for scalar verifications) is the rank histogram; this histogram is expected to be more or less flat, since for a reliable ensemble, the ranks are uniformly distributed among their possible outcomes. Quantitative tests for flatness (e.g. Pearson's goodness–of–fit test) have been suggested; without exception though, these tests assume the ranks to be a sequence of independent random variables, which is not the case in general as can be demonstrated with simple toy examples. In this paper, tests are developed that take the temporal correlations between the ranks into account. A refined analysis exploiting the reliability property shows that the ranks still exhibit strong decay of correlations. This property is key to the analysis, and the proposed tests are valid for general ensemble forecasting systems with minimal extraneous assumptions

Electron-hadron shower discrimination in a liquid argon time projection chamber

By exploiting structural differences between electromagnetic and hadronic showers in a multivariate analysis we present an efficient Electron-Hadron discrimination algorithm for liquid argon time projection chambers, validated using Geant4 simulated data