Verification of forecasted precipitation from Tropical Storm Hermine in the Canary Islands

Abstract

Tropical Storm Hermine hit the Canary Islands on 24–26 September 2022 as an extremely anomalous tropical cyclone. Hermine formed from an Easterly Wave that travelled from Sudan to the Atlantic. Hermine headed north and interacted with an extratropical trough over the Canary Islands, following the conceptual model of a Predecessor Rain Event, with precipitation characterised mostly by continuous accumulation rather than by convective intensity. In this article, modelled 24h precipitation is verified with spatial methods against satellite and station observations. The performance of the ECMWF high-resolution model was similar or perhaps even better than a local, higher resolution model.