| Summary: | A calculation of the dependence of forecast limits on the spatial resolution (that is, the effective observation density) of the meteorological data used to initialize a forecast model is demonstrated. The calculation uses the fact that the effective error-energy spectrum of meteorological measurements of a specific spatial resolution has a rapid transition from zero to 100 % of the background energy spectrum at a wavenumber corresponding to the smallest resolvable scale. For the forecast model of E. N. Lorenz (1969), doubling the data resolution by halving the smallest resolvable scale from 78 to 39 km, for example, extends the forecast limit by 1.4 h.
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