An evaluation of five WRF-ARW microphysics schemes using synthetic GOES imagery for an atmospheric river event affecting the California coast

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.