Blizzard Conditions in the Canadian Arctic: Observations and Automated Products for Forecasting
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Blizzard conditions occur regularly in the Canadian Arctic, with high impact on travel and life there. These extreme conditions are challenging to forecast for this vast domain because the observation network is sparse and remote sensing coverage is limited. To establish occurrence statistics we analyzed aviation routine weather reports (METARs) from Canadian Arctic stations between October and May 2014–18. Blizzard conditions occur most frequently in open tundra east and north of the boreal forest boundary, with the highest frequency found on the northwest side of Hudson Bay and over flat terrain in central Baffin Island. Except in sheltered locations, the reported cause of reduced visibility is blowing snow without precipitating snow in about one-half to two-thirds of METARs made by a human observer, even higher at some stations. We produce three products that forecast blizzard conditions from postprocessed NWP model output. The blizzard potential (BP), generated from expert’s rules, is intended for warning well in advance of areas where blizzard conditions may develop. A second product (BH) stems from regression equations for the probability of visibility ≤ 1 km in blowing snow and/or concurrent snow derived by Baggaley and Hanesiak. A third product (RF), generated with the random forest ensemble classification algorithm, makes a consensus YES/NO forecast for blizzard conditions. We describe the products, provide verification, and show forecasts for a significant blizzard event. Receiver operator characteristic curves and critical success index scores show RF forecasts have greater accuracy than BP and BH forecasts at all lead times.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it