Impact of land surface physics in WRF on the simulation of sea breeze circulation over southeast coast of India

Abstract

In this work, the impact of land surface physics in simulating the sea and land breeze circulation along the south east coast of India near Kalpakkam is studied using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model for emergency response application. Simulations were conducted with three different land surface models (LSMs)—5-Layer soil thermal diffusion scheme (5-Layer), Noah land surface model (Noah) and Noah Multi-Physics land surface model (Noah-MP) for different days in summer and southwest monsoon. Observations from meteorological towers, automated weather stations, sonic anemometers and GPS Radiosonde profiles were used for comparison. Results indicate that the Noah-MP followed by Noah schemes produce more realistic simulations of the sea breeze circulation in terms of intensity, onset time, duration, horizontal and vertical extents in most of the studied cases compared to the 5-Layer scheme. Results indicate that the 5-Layer model grossly overestimated air temperature, heat flux and boundary layer height relative to Noah and Noah-MP schemes. The Noah-MP scheme better represented the land-surface feedback in terms of soil temperature, skin temperature and surface energy fluxes leading to more realistic simulations of sea breeze and boundary layer characteristics.