P3.2
An evaluation of five WRF-ARW microphysics schemes using synthetic GOES imagery for an atmospheric river event affecting the California coast
Isidora Jankov, CIRA/Colorado State Univ., Boulder, CO; and L. Grasso, M. Sengupta, P. J. Neiman, D. Zupanski, M. Zupanski, D. T. Lindsey, D. W. Hillger, D. L. Birkenheuer, R. Brummer, and H. Yuan
We assess synthetic satellite imagery as a tool for model evaluation performance in addition to more traditional approaches. For this test, synthetic GOES-10 imagery at 10.7 m was produced using output from the Advanced Research Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF-ARW) model for numerical weather prediction. Use of synthetic imagery is a unique method to indirectly evaluate the performance of various microphysical schemes available within the WRF-ARW.
In the present study, a simulation of an atmospheric river event that occurred 30 December, 2005 was evaluated. The simulations were performed using the WRF-ARW numerical model with five different microphysical schemes (Lin, WSM6, Thompson, Schultz and double-moment Morrison). Synthetic imagery was created and scenes from the simulations were statistically compared with observations from the 10.7 µm band of the GOES-10 imager using a histogram-based technique. The results indicate that synthetic satellite imagery may potentially be very useful in model performance evaluation as a complementary metric to traditional methods. For example, accumulated precipitation analyses and other commonly used fields in model evaluation show a good agreement among solutions from various microphysical schemes, while the synthetic imagery analysis pointed toward notable differences in simulations of clouds among the microphysical schemes.
Poster Session 3, Satellite Observations in Predictive Models of Weather and Climate - Posters
Tuesday, 28 September 2010, 3:00 PM-5:00 PM, ABC Pre-Function
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