The coincidence of extreme cold, precipitation, and freezing weather is one of the most significant natural disasters in winter, with extensive impacts on public transportation, the energy industry, and the ecological landscape. Despite the importance of such events, comprehensive analyses of the performance of cutting-edge numerical weather prediction models at convection-permitting scales remain inadequate. This paper investigates the prolonged freezing event that occurred from January 24 to 28, 2018 in South China using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model with a horizontal grid spacing of 3 km. The focus is on evaluating the performance of the WRF model and the impact of microphysical parameterizations and nudging techniques. The results show that the WRF model successfully captures the main features of the prolonged freezing event, including the low-level collision of cold and warm air in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River valley and the spatial distribution of precipitation. However, the model overestimates the strength of warm air from the south, leading to a northward shift of the precipitation belt. The choice of physical parameterizations significantly influences model performance, with microphysical schemes of P3, Thompson, and MYDM showing better model skill in terms of root mean square error (RMSE). The analysis also highlights the importance of nudging techniques, particularly grid nudging, which significantly improves model performance. Furthermore, the inclusion of local, very dense station observations from the China Meteorological Administration (CMA) during the nudging process provides additional improvement. A further investigation reveals that the accuracy in reproducing low-level convergence over South China is the main factor influencing model performance across different sensitivity simulations. This study underscores the value of convection-permitting simulations in accurately reproducing extreme freezing events over China.
Read full abstract