Regional Forecast Model

The 3-d mesoscale model used in this research, the Subsynoptic Scale Model (SSM), is a hydrostatic, semi-implicit, primitive equations model which is an adaptation of the Australian Region Primitive Equations Model to the Northern hemisphere. This model has been successfully run at a horizontal resolution down to twenty kilometers and has been utilized for research applications at the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS: see the CIMMS homepage) for more than a decade, with continual improvement. Since 1992, this model has been run in real-time at 80-km horizontal grid spacing, with 24 vertical levels and forecast duration of 48 hours. Verification tools, which also run daily (verifying the forecasts against analysis and also against radiosonde reports within the domain), indicate that the 80-km model version has about the same level of skill as the Nest Grid Model (NGM) at the National Meteorological Center (NMC).

The model is used in all three products: