Statistical Forecasts for the Occurrence of Precipitation Outperform Global Models over Northern Tropical Africa

Short-term global ensemble predictions of rainfall currently have no skill over northern tropical Africa when compared to simple climatology-based forecasts, even after sophisticated statistical postprocessing. Here, we demonstrate that 1-day forecasts for the probability precipitation occurrence based on a logistic regression model considerable potential improvement. The new approach present here relies gridded estimates from Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission July-September 1998–2017 and uses amounts pixels show highest positive negative correlations previous two days as input. Forecasts using this are reliable higher resolution better than forecasts. good performance is related westward propagating African easterly waves embedded mesoscale convective systems. outmatched by postprocessed dynamical forecast in dry outer tropics only, where extratropical influences important.