A Numerical Experiment to Study the Effect of Anthropogenic Heat And Moisture on Local Weather

Abstract

The current study addresses the effect of the heat and moisture emitted from anthropogenic sources on local weather with the aid of Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF). In this study, anthropogenic source of heat and moisture is mainly considered as the industrial activity. The present study is done for two different cases i) effect of only heat on local weather with no moisture change ii) effect of both heat and moisture on local weather. Angul region located at 20.85 °N, 85.19 °E in the Odisha state of India is chosen as the study region. A comparative study is done with different physics options available in the WRF model and the same is compared with TRMM PR observation for a heavy rain event occurred during 16.08.2008. TRMM validated WRF simulation constitutes the control run against which comparisons for other cases are made. A numerical experiment is performed to understand the effect of anthropogenic heat and moisture on local weather for the same region. For this, the temperature at the surface level is perturbed by increasing it by 10 K near the industrial site and exponentially decreasing with height up to the atmospheric boundary layer. The design of the numerical experiment is such that the sensible heat, latent heat, and moisture parameters are affected by changing the temperature parameter alone. From the numerical experimentation, it has been found that the rainfall intensity increases locally in a reasonable manner with the addition of only heat or with the addition of moisture along with heat. The rate of increase of rainfall is less in only heating than heat and moisture addition.