Abstract
In this study, the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model is used to produce short-term regional climate simulations with several configurations for the Carpathian Basin region. The goal is to evaluate the performance of the model and analyze its sensitivity to different physical and dynamical settings, and input data. Fifteen experiments were conducted with WRF at 10 km resolution for the year 2013. The simulations differ in terms of configuration options such as the parameterization schemes, the hydrostatic and non-hydrostatic dynamical cores, the initial and boundary conditions (ERA5 and ERA-Interim reanalyses), the number of vertical levels, and the length of the spin-up period. E-OBS dataset 2 m temperature, total precipitation, and global radiation are used for validation. Temperature underestimation reaches 4–7 °C for some experiments and can be reduced by certain physics scheme combinations. The cold bias in winter and spring is mainly caused by excessive snowfall and too persistent snow cover, as revealed by comparison with satellite-based observations and a test simulation without snow on the surface. Annual precipitation is overestimated by 0.6–3.8 mm day−1, with biases mainly accumulating in the period driven by large-scale weather processes. Downward shortwave radiation is underestimated all year except in the months dominated by locally forced phenomena (May to August) when a positive bias prevails. The incorporation of downward shortwave radiation to the validation variables increased the understanding of underlying problems with the parameterization schemes and highlighted false model error compensations.
Highlights
Hungary, located in the Carpathian Basin in Central Europe, lies in the transitional zone between projected increase and decrease in mean summer precipitation by the end of the twenty-first century, according to the ensemble-median of the EURO-CORDEX regional climate model (RCM) simulations (Jacob et al 2014; Rajczak and Schär 2017)
The Taylor plots (Taylor 2001) for the two subregions show the normalized standard deviation, the normalized root mean square error (RMSE), and the Pearson correlation coefficient (r) of daily mean temperature derived from the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) simulations relative to the E-OBS data (Fig. 4, filled circles)
To understand the behavior of the “wsm3” run, we examined the mean temperature and hydrometeor mixing ratio profiles for situations when 3-hourly accumulated snow water equivalent in this experiment is at least four times as much as in “ref” and “ysu”
Summary
Hungary, located in the Carpathian Basin in Central Europe, lies in the transitional zone between projected increase and decrease in mean summer precipitation by the end of the twenty-first century, according to the ensemble-median of the EURO-CORDEX regional climate model (RCM) simulations (Jacob et al 2014; Rajczak and Schär 2017). It is advised to assess the sensitivity of the model to different dynamical configurations and physical parameterizations before long-term integration (Giorgi 2019). Mooney et al (2013) tested the performance of the WRF RCM for several subregions of Europe based on a set of 6-year-long model runs combining different microphysics, PBL, longwave radiation, and land-surface schemes. WRF results validated within the EURO-CORDEX framework for the 1990–2008 period (Kotlarski et al 2014; Katragkou et al 2015), and further five-year-long experiments on the EUROCORDEX domain (García-Díez et al 2015) show an underestimation of 2 m temperature in Eastern Europe in the cold season and a positive precipitation bias. 1-year simulations are performed with WRF using different initial and boundary conditions (ICBC) datasets, dynamical settings, and physical parameterization schemes.
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