Evaluation of the WRF-Lake Model over Two Major Freshwater Lakes in China

Abstract

This paper evaluates the performance of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model coupled with a lake scheme over the Lake Poyang and Lake Dongting regions. We choose several cases with different weather characteristics, including winter with/without precipitation and summer with/without precipitation, and conduct a series of experiments (without the lake model, with the default lake model, and with a calibrated lake model that adjusts the water absorption, extinction coefficients, and surface roughness length) for each case. The results show that the performance of the lake model is significantly affected by the weather conditions. For the winter with precipitation cases, the performance of the default lake model is even worse than without the lake model, but the calibrated lake model can obviously reduce the biases of 2-m temperature and dew-point temperature. Although the performance of the default and new calibrated models is intricate for other cases, the new calibrated model has prominent advantages for 2-m dew-point temperature. Moreover, a long-term simulation of five months also shows that the new calibrated coupled lake model performs better than the default one. These imply that the new calibrated coupled lake model is more suitable to be used in studies of the effects of Lake Poyang and Lake Dongting on regional weather and climate.