WRF simulation for a heavy rainfall event over the huaihe river basin, China — An evaluation using remote sensing and ground observations

Abstract

Aiming to simulate a heavy rainfall process with higher spatiotemporal resolution over the Huaihe River Basin (HRB), the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model was adopted with a nested domain setting the spatial resolutions as 15km and 5km, respectively. TRMM 3B42 estimates and meteorological station observations were collected to evaluate the WRF simulation performance on precipitation in daily and weekly time scale. The WRF predicted rainfall with a spatial resolution of 5km was tested to be slightly higher than that with 15km. Compared to the ground observations, the correlation coefficient scores of WRF daily accumulated precipitations reached up to 0.70. Contrasting with TRMM estimates, the threat scores of the heavy rainfall with a threshold exceeded 50 mm reached up to 0.215 and 0.434, respectively in the daily and weekly time scales which demonstrated the feasibility of the TRMM 3B42 precipitation for evaluating the WRF performance for heavy precipitation simulations.