Regional Model Evaluation for Alaska: focus on hydroclimatology

The arctic hydrologic cycle is known to be changing quickly, as air temperatures increase, glaciers melt, and permafrost thaws. Because the region is data sparse, climate models and reanalyses can be important tools for studying hydroclimatological change. Grid cell size and scale-dependent physics in climate models, however, impact the resolution of key hydroclimatological processes. An effort is described wherein several new regional models and reanalyses are compared to raw and bias-corrected observations for the Alaska domain for the period 2000-2008. These include a 15 km run of the Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF) laterally-forced by the Community Atmospheric Model 3.1 (CAM3.1), a 15 km run of WRF laterally-forced by the National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) reanalysis, 1 degree CAM-HOMME (a newly developed dynamically core for CAM), a reconstructed precipitation product derived from the NASA Catchment Land Surface Model, the Arctic Regional Reanalysis, and station data.