Sea Breeze prediction- which is the best model to use?
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Which weather models have members found best for the prediction of sea breezes and their wind shifts?
The ECMWF seems fairly good.
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@tdaley
The sea breeze due to the difference of heat capacity between land and sea and resulting in a convection is a local wind along the coast during the hot season.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_breeze
Only weather models with a good resolution are able to show these winds. So you cannot use GFS (22 km) to predict the type of wind. The ECMWF model (9km) is better, but depending where you are living, the regional high resolution models that Windy provides (ICON, NEMS, NAM, AROME) are the best to predict sea breeze.
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... also high resolution models with outputs in 1-hr steps,
give more precisely the time for wind shift.
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Prediction of sea/mountain/valley breezes and other "mountain waves" is pretty delicate to compute/extract in/from NWP models. Such a very local forecast is rather generated by forecasters who use their local environment knowledge and human analysis of several real time observations (e.g. AMDAR messages from aircrafts). Here is an article on the difficulty to predict sea breezes.
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@vsinceac
many thanks. I found Chris Steele's thesis on North Sea Sea Breezes interesting- https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/45009/
Tim
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@tdaley Yep, that thesis looks very interesting; even if it is focused on wind farms, met towers and other measures in this area, it emphasizes the difficulty of forecasting breezes in NWP models.
This is the reason for relying more on local breeze forecasts, made by forecasters, than on models.
