Abstract
The meteorological model WRF-ARW (Weather Research and Forecasting - Advanced Research WRF) is a new generation model that has a worldwide growing community of users. In the framework of a project that studies the feasibility of implementing it operationally at the Meteorological Service of Catalonia, a verification of the forecasts produced by the model in several cases of precipitation observed over Catalonia has been carried out. Indeed, given the importance of precipitation forecasts in this area, one of the main objectives was to study the sensitivity of the model in different configurations of its parameterizations of convection and cloud microphysics. In this paper, we present the results of this verification for two domains, a 36-km grid size and one of 12 km grid size, unidirectionally nested to the previous one. In the external domain, the evaluation was based on the analysis of the main statistical parameters (ME and RMSE) for temperature, relative humidity, geopotential and wind, and it has been determined that the combination using the Kain-Fritsch convective scheme with the WSM5 microphysical scheme has provided the best results. Then, with this configuration set for the external domain, some forecasts at the nested domain have been done, by combining different convection and cloud microphysics schemes, leading to the conclusion that the most accurate configuration is the one combining the convective parameterization of Kain-Fritsch and the Thompson microphysics scheme.
Highlights
IntroductionUnder the leadership of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), United States, a new limited area model has been developed, the Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF)
In recent years, several limited area meteorological models have been used for operational weather forecasting in Catalonia.The Meteorological Service of Catalonia (SMC), for example, has been working with MASS, MM5 and Lokal Modell (Sairouni et al, 2007).Recently, under the leadership of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), United States, a new limited area model has been developed, the Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF)
In the 36 km grid size domain the temperature, relative humidity, geopotential height and wind speed forecast have been verified by calculating the mean error (ME), that helps to determine whether the model as a whole shows any bias in the prognosis of these variables, and the root mean square deviation (RMSE), which can be interpreted as the typical magnitude of the error (Wilks, 1995), as it has the units of the evaluated variable
Summary
Under the leadership of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), United States, a new limited area model has been developed, the Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF). According to Klemp (2006), one of the WRF objectives is to accelerate the transfer of advances in research to operational meteorology All these features, along with the fact of being a free distribution model, have attracted a large number of users. Along with the fact of being a free distribution model, have attracted a large number of users For these reasons, the study of the behavior of the WRF in Catalonia was considered to be useful, especially considering a future operational use. In the case of Catalonia, a considerable proportion of the recorded precipitation comes from convective clouds, which represent up to the 70-80% of the total precipitation in summer (Llasat and Puigcerver, 1997), and in the geographical area of the Western Mediterranean, where most episodes of extreme rainfall and floods are caused by convective episodes (Llasat, 2001)
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