WRF NMEFC

The Global Energy and Water Exchanges (GEWEX)/Global Atmospheric System Study (GASS)/ Impact of initialized land temperature and snowpack on sub-seasonal to seasonal prediction (LS4P) project focuses on understanding the impact of the initialization of large scale land surface temperature and snow pack in climate models on the sub-seasonal to seasonal (S2S) prediction over different regions using multiple Earth System Models (ESMs) and regional climate models (RCMs). In this study, we perform the LS4P simulations with the National Marine Environmental Forecasting Center operational Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model with a horizontal resolution of 23 km over East Asia in year 2003. The preliminary results reveal that the EC-driven WRF simulations can only capture weak June precipitation response in the Yangzi River basin (YRB) to the May land temperature anomalies in the Tibetan Plateau (TP). This weak relationship is likely associated to the problems in sustaining the temperature anomaly upstream and the too strong influence from the lateral conditions. We will explore potentially improved representation of this relationship in WRF by implementing forcings from a global ESM. We will analyze the differences between these simulations to hopefully gain some insights on how to improve the S2S prediction skills with the regional modeling framework.