Impact of Urban Canopy and High Horizontal Resolution on Summer Convective Rainfall in Urban Area: A Case Study of Rainfall Events on 16 August 2015

The objective of this study is to examine the impact of urban canopy and the horizontal resolution on simulated meteorological variables such as 10-m wind speed, 2-m temperature and precipitation using WRF model for a local, convective rainfall case. We performed four sensitivity tests by varying the use of urban canopy model (UCM) and the horizontal resolutions, then compared the model results with observations of AWS network. The focus of our study is over the Seoul metropolitan area for a convective rainfall that occurred on Aug 16, 2015. The analysis shows that mean diurnal variation of temperature is better simulated by the model runs with UCM before the convective rainfall. However, after rainfall, model shows significant difference in air temperature among sensitivity tests depending on the simulated rainfall amount. The rainfall amount is significantly underestimated in 0.5 km resolution model run compared to 1.5 km resolution, particularly over the urban areas. This is due to earlier occurrence of light rainfall in 0.5 km resolution model. Earlier light rainfall in the afternoon eliminates convective instability significantly, which prevents occurrence of rainfall later in the evening. The use of UCM results in a higher maximum rainfall in the domain, which is due to higher temperature in model runs with urban canopy. Earlier occurrence of rainfall in 0.5 km resolution model is related to rapid growth of PBL. Enhanced mixing and higher temperature result in rapid growth of PBL, which provides more favorable conditions for convection in the 0.5 km resolution run with urban canopy. All sensitivity tests show dry bias, which also contributes to the occurrence of light precipitation throughout the simulation period.