Identification

Title

Surface clear-sky shortwave radiative closure intercomparisons in the Weather Research and Forecasting model

Abstract

The ability of the Rapid Radiative Transfer Model for GCMs (RRTMG) and Goddard shortwave (SW) radiative schemes to reproduce global (GHI), direct (DNI), and diffuse (DIF) fluxes at the surface in clear-sky conditions is examined within the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) modeling framework. The models were forced using measurements of precipitable water and aerosol optical properties from five AERONET sites and were evaluated against high-quality observations of GHI, DNI, and DIF at four nearby or coincident sites of the SURFRAD network and one at the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Central Facility in the contiguous US. In addition, the performance has been intercompared against the Dudhia broadband SW parameterization together with a regressive model to calculate DNI and DIF and the top-class SMARTS2 SW spectral model. The role of aerosols has been investigated by running the models with and without aerosols. All of them have shown outstanding skill at predicting GHI within the range of the expected observational error, regardless of whether aerosol information is provided as input. When aerosol information is not provided, DNI and DIF are affected by strong biases. In contrast, providing observed aerosols as input solves the bias issue for DNI and nearly does for DIF using the RRTMG scheme. The RRTMG has also proven to have high potential skill for long-term assessment of clear-sky GHI, DNI, and DIF irradiance, as long as reliable aerosol inputs are provided. Considering its simplicity, the Dudhia scheme has also shown a remarkable ability for solar resource assessment in clear-sky conditions.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d79w0gd2

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

2013-09-16T00:00:00Z

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

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