Identification

Title

Some practical considerations regarding horizontal resolution in the first generation of operational convection-allowing NWP

Abstract

During the 2005 NOAA Hazardous Weather Testbed Spring Experiment two different high-resolution configurations of the Weather Research and Forecasting-Advanced Research WRF (WRF-ARW) model were used to produce 30-h forecasts 5 days a week for a total of 7 weeks. These configurations used the same physical parameterizations and the same input dataset for the initial and boundary conditions, differing primarily in their spatial resolution. The first set of runs used 4-km horizontal grid spacing with 35 vertical levels while the second used 2-km grid spacing and 51 vertical levels. Output from these daily forecasts is analyzed to assess the numerical forecast sensitivity to spatial resolution in the upper end of the convection-allowing range of grid spacing. The focus is on the central United States and the time period 18-30 h after model initialization. The analysis is based on a combination of visual comparison, systematic subjective verification conducted during the Spring Experiment, and objective metrics based largely on the mean diurnal cycle of the simulated reflectivity and precipitation fields. Additional insight is gained by examining the size distributions of the individual reflectivity and precipitation entities, and by comparing forecasts of mesocyclone occurrence in the two sets of forecasts. In general, the 2-km forecasts provide more detailed presentations of convective activity, but there appears to be little, if any, forecast skill on the scales where the added details emerge. On the scales where both model configurations show higher levels of skill-the scale of mesoscale convective features-the numerical forecasts appear to provide comparable utility as guidance for severe weather forecasters. These results suggest that, for the geographical, phenomenological, and temporal parameters of this study, any added value provided by decreasing the grid increment from 4 to 2 km (with commensurate adjustments to the vertical resolution) may not be worth the considerable increases in computational expense.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7x0676c

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

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Text

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title

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reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

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date type

publication

effective date

2008-10-01T00:00:00Z

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Copyright 2008 American Meteorological Society (AMS). Permission to use figures, tables, and brief excerpts from this work in scientific and educational works is hereby granted provided that the source is acknowledged. Any use of material in this work that is determined to be "fair use" under Section 107 or that satisfies the conditions specified in Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law (17 USC, as revised by P.L. 94-553) does not require the Society's permission. Republication, systematic reproduction, posting in electronic form on servers, or other uses of this material, except as exempted by the above statements, requires written permission or license from the AMS. Additional details are provided in the AMS Copyright Policies, available from the AMS at 617-227-2425 or amspubs@ametsoc.org. Permission to place a copy of this work on this server has been provided by the AMS. The AMS does not guarantee that the copy provided here is an accurate copy of the published work.

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None

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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

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pointOfContact

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