Analysis of stable components in the extended-range forecast for the coming 10-30 days in winter 2010 and 2011

In this paper we try to extract stable components in the extended-range forecast for the coming 10–30 days by using empirical orthogonal function （EOF） analysis, similarity coefficient, and some other methods based on the National Center for Environmental Prediction （NCEP）/National Center for Atmospheric Research （NCAR） reanalysis daily data. The comparisons of the coefficient of variance of climatological background field and truth data in winter between 2010 and 2011 are made. The method of extracting stable components and climatological background field can be helpful to increase forecasting skill. The forecasting skill improvement of air temperature is better than geopotential height at 500 hPa. Moreover, this method improves the predictability better in the Pacific Ocean. In China, the forecast in winter in Northeast China is more uncertain than in the other parts.

Research of whispered speech vocal tract system conversion based on universal background model and effective Gaussian components

Directing to the weakness of the present fixed values mapping methods （method_F）, a vocal tract system conversion method based on the universal background model （UBM） is proposed for improving the performance of the speech conversion system from Chinese whis- pered speech to normal speech. For the numerous components of UBM, the errors produced by the acoustical probability density statistical model can＇t be ignored. Thus an effective Gaus- sian mixture components chosen method based on the posterior probability summation of the minimum spectral distortion is developed to optimizing the system performance. The proposed method （method_U） is analyzed and compared using the performance index （PI） based on Itakura-Saito spectral distortion measure. It is shown experimentally that the performance of method_U is more stability for different speakers and different phonemes than that of method_F. The average PI of method_U is better than method_F. It is shown that by selecting effective Gaussian mixture components, the PI of method_U can be further improved 5.11%. Subjective auditory tests also show that the proposed method can improve the definition and intelligibility of conversion speech.