Sensitivity of WRF-derived hydrometeorological extremes to sea surface temperatures in regions with complex topography and diverse climate

Abstract

This study investigates the impact of sea surface temperature (SST) describing the lower boundary of Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model on the extreme weather events that occurred on the Mediterranean (MED) and the Eastern Black Sea (EBS) regions of Turkey. For each region, one extreme event case is selected and characterized as a summer convective system in EBS and as a winter synoptic system in MED region. The SST impact on the WRF model forecasts of these events is accomplished in two ways. First, the SST analysis is conducted by making a 10-days simulation for each event with and without activating the SST options (update and skin options) available in the model configuration. In these runs, the selected initial and boundary condition datasets, Global Forecasting System (GFS) for the MED region and the ERA5 for the EBS regions, provide corresponding internal SST data. Second, the prediction performance of the model is evaluated among the simulations of non-external, time-varying (GFS and ERA5 SST) and external, time–varying, high-resolution SST products (The Group for High Resolution Sea Surface Temperature; GHRSST, Medspiration, and NCEP) for each event. The results show that the WRF model simulations, even for short-term event predictions, are highly sensitive to time-variant SST options. The overestimation and high spreading feature of maximum and total precipitation are realistically reduced by time-variant SST products. The Medspiration and the NCEP sources for the MED region and the GHRSST and the Medspiration sources for the EBS region yielded warmer SSTs among the simulations. By establishing the amplified air-sea interactions, these sources provide more appropriate peak precipitation distributions in both regions. Furthermore, based on this study, the effect of using high-resolution SST (GHRSST and Medspiration) is more prominent in predicting convective event developed over complex topography of the EBS while the resolution effect is not much critical for synoptic system simulation even under the complex topography in MED. Lastly, the highest mean correlation of conditional hourly rain is calculated as 0.65 with the Medspiration product on MED and 0.48 with the GHRSST product on the EBS region.