We present an approach to improve forecast accuracy by simultaneously forecasting a group of products that exhibit similar seasonal demand patterns. Better seasonality estimates can be made by using information on all products in a group, and using these improved estimates when forecasting at the individual product level. This approach is called the group seasonal indices (GSI) approach, and is...

Modeling and forecasting techniques of the tourist arrivals are many and diverse. Th ere is no unique model that exactly outperforms the other models in every situation. Actually a few studies have realized modeling and forecasting the tourist arrivals to Turkey and these studies have not focused on the total tourist arrivals. Th ese studies have focused on the tourist arrivals to Turkey countr...

[1] Useful probabilistic climate forecasts on decadal timescales should be reliable (i.e., forecast probabilities match the observed relative frequencies) but this is seldom examined. This paper assesses a necessary condition for reliability, which the ratio of ensemble spread to forecast error being close to one, for seasonal to decadal sea surface temperature retrospective forecasts from the ...

The importance of initial state and boundary forcing for atmospheric predictability is explored on global to regional spatial scales and on daily to seasonal time scales. A general circulation model is used to conduct predictability experiments with different combinations of initial and boundary conditions. The experiments are verified under perfect model assumptions as well as against observat...

Meteorological extremes have large impacts on society. The fact that approximately 40% of the Netherlands is below sea level makes this country especially vulnerable to flooding, both from the sea and from rivers. This has resulted in extensive research on the statistics of extremes. However, applications to meteorological and hydrological situations are always hampered by the brevity of the av...

BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVES Japanese encephalitis (JE) is one of the dreaded mosquito-borne viral diseases mostly prevalent in south Asian countries including India. Early warning of the disease in terms of disease intensity is crucial for taking adequate and appropriate intervention measures. The present study was carried out in Dibrugarh district in the state of Assam located in the northeastern ...

JMA operates NWP models to meet various kinds of requirements on weather forecasting. The suite of the NWP models covers a wide temporal range of forecast periods from a few hours to two seasons providing a seamless sequence of products for the public. The Global Spectral Model (GSM) produces 84-hour forecast four times a day (00, 06, 12, 18 UTC) to support the official short-range forecasting ...

Periodic models for seasonal data allow the parameters of the model to vary across the different seasons. This paper uses the components of UK consumption to see whether the periodic autoregressive (PAR) model yields more accurate forecasts than non-periodic models, such as the airline model of Box and Jenkins (1970), and autoregressive models that pre-test for (seasonal) unit roots. We analyse...

Successful climate prediction at seasonal-to-interannual time scales may depend on the optimal initialization of the land surface states, in particular soil moisture (Koster and Suarez 2001). Such optimal initialization can be achieved by assimilating soil moisture observations into the land model prior to the forecast. We assess the performance of the Extended Kalman filter (EKF) and the Ensem...

OBJECTIVES The authors investigated whether models using time series methods can generate accurate short-term forecasts of emergency department (ED) bed occupancy, using traditional historical averages models as comparison. METHODS From July 2005 through June 2006, retrospective hourly ED bed occupancy values were collected from three tertiary care hospitals. Three models of ED bed occupancy ...