Identification

Title

Can convection‐permitting modeling provide decent precipitation for offline high‐resolution snowpack simulations over mountains?

Abstract

Accurate precipitation estimates are critical to simulating seasonal snowpack evolution. We conduct and evaluate high-resolution (4-km) snowpack simulations over the western United States (WUS) mountains in Water Year 2013 using the Noah with multi-parameterization (Noah-MP) land surface model driven by precipitation forcing from convection-permitting (4-km) Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) modeling and four widely used high-resolution datasets that are derived from statistical interpolation based on in situ measurements. Substantial differences in the precipitation amount among these five datasets, particularly over the western and northern portions of WUS mountains, significantly affect simulated snow water equivalent (SWE) and snow depth (SD) but have relatively limited effects on snow cover fraction (SCF) and surface albedo. WRF generally captures observed precipitation patterns and results in an overall best-performed SWE and SD in the western and northern portions of WUS mountains, where the statistically interpolated datasets lead to underpredicted precipitation, SWE, and SD. Over the interior WUS mountains, all the datasets consistently underestimate precipitation, causing significant negative biases in SWE and SD, among which the results driven by the WRF precipitation show an average performance. Further analysis reveals systematic positive biases in SCF and surface albedo across the WUS mountains, with similar bias patterns and magnitudes for simulations driven by different precipitation datasets, suggesting an urgent need to improve the Noah-MP snowpack physics. This study highlights that convection-permitting modeling with proper configurations can have added values in providing decent precipitation for high-resolution snowpack simulations over the WUS mountains in a typical ENSO-neutral year, particularly over observation-scarce regions.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d74j0j9j

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2019-12-16T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Copypright 2019 American Geophysical Union.

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact