A Climate Version of the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System

Abstract

The Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (RAMS) has been widely used to simulate relatively short-term atmospheric processes. To perform full-year to multi-year model integrations, a climate version of RAMS (ClimRAMS) has been developed, and is used to simulate diurnal, seasonal, and annual cycles of atmospheric and hydrologic variables and interactions within the central United States during 1989. The model simulation uses a 200-km grid covering the conterminous United States, and a nested, 50-km grid covering the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain states of Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, Wyoming, and Colorado. The model’s lateral boundary conditions are forced by six-hourly NCEP reanalysis products. ClimRAMS includes simplified precipitation and radiation sub-models, and representations that describe the seasonal evolution of vegetation-related parameters. In addition, ClimRAMS can use all of the general RAMS capabilities, like its more complex radiation sub-models, and explicit cloud and precipitation microphysics schemes. Thus, together with its nonhydrostatic and fully-interactive telescoping-grid capabilities, ClimRAMS can be applied to a wide variety of problems. Because of non-linear interactions between the land surface and atmosphere, simulating the observed climate requires simulating the observed diurnal, synoptic, and seasonal cycles. While previous regional climate modeling studies have demonstrated their ability to simulate the seasonal cycles through comparison with observed monthly-mean temperature and precipitation data sets, this study demonstrates that a regional climate model can also capture observed diurnal and synoptic variability. Observed values of daily precipitation and maximum and minimum screen-height air temperature are used to demonstrate this ability.