Results of the meteorological model WRF-ARW over Catalonia, using different parameterizations of convection and cloud microphysics (original) (raw)

2010, Tethys, Journal of Weather and Climate of the Western Mediterranean

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.