Abstract
Abstract The simulations of five midlatitude precipitating events by the nonhydrostatic mesoscale model Méso-NH are analyzed. These cases cover contrasted precipitation situations from 30° to 60°N, which are typical of midlatitudes. They include a frontal case with light precipitation over the Rhine River area (10 February 2000), a long-lasting precipitation event at Hoek van Holland, Netherlands (19 September 2001), a moderate rain case over the Elbe (12 August 2002), an intense rain case over Algiers (10 November 2001), and the “millennium storm” in the United Kingdom (30 October 2000). The physically consistent hydrometeor and thermodynamic outputs are used to generate a database for cloud and precipitation retrievals. The hydrometeor vertical profiles that were generated vary mostly with the 0°C isotherm, located between 1 and 3 km in height depending on the case. The characteristics of this midlatitude database are complementary to the GPROF database, which mostly concentrates on tropical situations. The realism of the simulations is evaluated against satellite observations by comparing synthetic brightness temperatures (BTs) with Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU), Special Sensor Microwave Imager (SSM/I), and Meteosat observations. The good reproduction of the BT distributions by the model is exploited by calculating categorical scores for verification purposes. The comparison with 3-hourly Meteosat observations demonstrates the ability of the model to forecast the time evolution of the cloud cover, the latter being better predicted for the stratiform cases than for others. The comparison with AMSU-B measurements shows the skill of the model to predict rainfall at the correct location.
Highlights
Research efforts are continuing in the aim of improving the modeling of cloud and precipitation processes, for both climate monitoring and weather forecasting
Retrieving rain rates is a motivation of passive microwave measurements from satellites in low earth orbit like the Special Sensor Microwave Imager (SSM/I) operational series and the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM)
The relationships between the atmospheric variables in the model and the simulated Brightness temperatures (BTs) are used to develop inversion procedures to retrieve cloud and precipitation fields from a set of satellite observations. An advantage of these mesoscale databases is that they provide profiles with a more detailed description of the microphysics than the low-resolution Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) can give, and associated with realistic synthetic BTs obtained from state-of-the art radiative transfer model (RTM)
Summary
Research efforts are continuing in the aim of improving the modeling of cloud and precipitation processes, for both climate monitoring and weather forecasting. The relationships between the atmospheric variables in the model and the simulated BTs are used to develop inversion procedures to retrieve cloud and precipitation fields from a set of satellite observations. An advantage of these mesoscale databases is that they provide profiles with a more detailed description of the microphysics than the low-resolution Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) can give, and associated with realistic synthetic BTs obtained from state-of-the art RTMs. The existing databases mainly sample tropical situations under convective conditions. The snow effects on BTs needed to be analyzed and simulated correctly as in Meirold-Mautner et al (2007)
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