Arctic land simulations with Polar WRF

The polar-optimized version of the state-of-the-art Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF) developed by the Polar Meteorology Group of Ohio State University's Byrd Polar Research Center is evaluated over Arctic land surfaces. Testing of "Polar WRF" comprises three stages and began with simulations representing conditions over the Greenland Ice Sheet. The second stage included simulations over the Arctic Ocean that were compared to the detailed observations of the Surface Heat Budget of the Arctic Ocean (SHEBA) during 1997/98. The first two stages lead to optimizations for the Noah land surface model for these applications. Furthermore, a new treatment was added during the second stage for grid points containing both open water and sea ice. For the current study, that represents the third stage, the polar optimizations are added to WRF version 3.0.1.1. Simulations are run as a series of 48-hr integrations starting each day at 0000 UTC for 15 November 2006 to 31 July 2007. Atmosphere initial and boundary conditions are from the Global Forecasting System (GFS) model of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Due to the slow spin-up of soil variables, however, a continuous simulation of soil temperature and moisture is performed through cycling the 48-hr soil output into initial conditions at the appropriate valid time. Collaborators on the Arctic System Reanalysis (ASR) project contributed to this study of Polar WRF for Arctic land. Initial soil conditions for 15 November 2006 are taken from a 10-year run Arctic run of Noah provided by collaborators at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). The deep soil temperature is provided by collaborators at the National Snow and Ice Data Center. Simulation results are compared to climatological observing sites of the Atmospheric Research Measurement North Slope of Alaska (NSA) sites at Barrow, AK and Atqasuk, AK, and the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites at Bonanza Creek, AK and near the Kuparuk River Basin.