Characteristics of Gales in Shanghai Coastal Zones and Early Zonal Warning Assessment of Gales

There are many ships and ports in Shanghai coastal zones, where disastrous weather occurs frequently. Meteorological disasters often threaten the safety of people’s lives and properties along the coast and in the ports. In the past, the meteorological warnings for Shanghai coastal zones are mainly based on those issued for Yangshan Port by Shanghai Marine Meteorological Centre (SMMC), which are called “unified warnings”. However, there are obvious differences in the time and intensity of meteorological disasters in each region, and the unified warnings cannot meet the needs of the production and operation of the shipping and ports. In 2020, Shanghai coastal zones were divided into five sub-zones, where the meteorological forecast and warnings were carried out separately from July 2020. Based on hourly observational data of the representative stations in Shanghai coastal zones and warning signal data from 2016 to 2022, the gale events are selected to analyse the statistical characteristics of temporal and spatial distribution and evaluate the forecast quality and the economic benefits of the zonal warnings. The results show that: (1) The farther away from the coastline, the more gale days, the higher the wind speed and the longer the duration; the higher the wind speed during the process, the more obvious the difference of wind scale. In particular, the wind scale caused by typhoons can range up to 5 levels. (2) Compared with the “unified warning”, the missing alarm rate (MAR) of gale warnings in each sea area has been reduced significantly, by up to 5%, the false alarm rate (FAR) for the western part of Yangtze River estuary is reduced by more than 8% and the TS score is significantly improved by more than 10%. (3) The advance time of gale warnings has been reduced by more than 3 hours, the maintaining duration has been shortened by more than 16 hours at most, which can reduce the loss of nearly 18 million RMB and improve the production efficiency of the coastal zones of Shanghai greatly. The results of this paper show that refined marine meteorological forecasts and early warnings provide a safety guarantee for marine transportation and port production operations, resulting in significant social and economic benefits and the enhancement of the comprehensive guarantee level of marine meteorological services in Shanghai. In the next step, we will continue to research and develop more refined objective forecast methods adapted to this business, then build a regional shared operational system platform and extend it to the Yangtze River Delta region, so as to promote the high-quality development of shipping meteorological integration in the Yangtze River Delta region.