Evaluation of precipitation over an oceanic region of Japan in convection-permitting regional climate model simulations

Abstract

We investigated the performance of a convection-permitting regional climate model with respect to precipitation in the present climate around the southwestern oceanic region of Japan. The effects of explicit representation of convective processes without cumulus parameterization can be properly estimated by using a model domain without complex topography or convoluted coastlines. The amounts of annual and monthly precipitation and the frequencies of daily and hourly precipitation were well reproduced by the convection-permitting model with a 2-km grid spacing, and its performance was better than that of a model with a coarser mesh. In particular, the frequencies of hourly precipitation in the convection-permitting simulation matched the observed frequencies for precipitation intensities below 20 mm h−1. Above intensities of 20 mm h−1, however, the convection-permitting model tended to overestimate the frequency of hourly precipitation. To explore the mechanism of this overestimation of heavy hourly precipitation, the sensitivity of the frequency distribution of precipitation to the horizontal resolution was tested by changing the horizontal grid spacing of the model from 2 to 4 km and then 1.5 km. The results showed that the overestimation was increased when the horizontal resolution was coarser, owing to spurious grid-scale precipitation, which causes heavy precipitation to be highly concentrated in a single grid. This spurious grid-scale precipitation may be caused by insufficient representation of convective downdrafts in convection-permitting simulations by models with coarser resolutions.