High Resolution Analysis and Modeling: Details in Coastal Weather?

The meteorological community has moved to ever higher resolution numerical weather predictions as a consequence of our increased computer capabilities. However, our ability to observe and accurately predict weather events down to scales that result in localized heavy precipitation and extreme winds is challenging at best, especially along the California coast with its complex topography. Significant progress is being made in developing a coastal mesoscale observing network to aid in monitoring small-scale weather patterns. These observations are used to quantify numerical model prediction error on small scales and results show definite limits to our predictive capability for localized weather patterns. These results show that the main source of error is often the larger scales and that the small scales are sometimes highly sensitive to small errors, which limits their predictability.