Benefit of convection permitting climate model simulations in the representation of convective precipitation

By Giorgia Fosser, Samiro Khodayar, Peter Berg. Climate Dynamics, 2014

265 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A major source of uncertainty in regional climate model (RCM) simulations arises from the parameterisation of sub-grid scale convection. With increasing model resolution, approaching the so-called convection permitting scale, it is possible to switch off most of the convection parameterisations. A set of simulations using COSMO-CLM model has been carried out at different resolutions in order to investigate possible improvements and limitations resulting from increased horizontal resolution. For our analysis, 30 years were simulated in a triple nesting setup with 50, 7 and 2.8 km resolutions, with ERA40 reanalysis data at the lateral boundaries of the coarsest nest. The investigation area covers the state of Baden-Württemberg in southwestern Germany, which is a region known for abundant orographically induced convective precipitation. A very dense network of high temporal resolution rain gauges is used for evaluation of the model simulations. The purpose of this study is to examine the differences between the 7 and 2.8 km resolutions in the representation of precipitation at sub-daily timescales, and the atmospheric conditions leading to convection. Our results show that the highest resolution of RCM simulations significantly improves the representation of both hourly intensity distribution and diurnal cycle of precipitation. In addition, at convection permitting scale the atmospheric fields related to convective precipitation show a better agreement with each other. The results imply that higher spatial resolution partially improves the representation of the precipitation field, which must be the way forward for regional climate modelling.

Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0891d512b3977b386338ef2dad956a73a6eaebb3

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Citations in the corpus

A review on regional convection‐permitting climate modeling: Demonstrations, prospects, and challenges (2015, methodology): “Moreover, small differences in the vertical profiles of temperature and humidity lead to systematically higher levels of cloud formation and free convection in CPM compared to LSM, which can lead to deep convection and explain the higher hourly precipitation intensities in CPM [Fosser et al., 2014].”
Convection‐permitting modeling with regional climate models: Latest developments and next steps (2021, methodology): “Using 2.2-km over western Germany and the Benelux regions, Meredith et al. (2019) revealed that the future intensification of extreme precipitation varies according to the diurnal cycle and that the maximum probability for the occurrence of extreme precipitation may shift from late afternoon to the ”