Weather has important effects on the operations of the United States Army. The Army desires very high-resolution analyses and forecasts for operations in the battlefield. This requires an analysis and modeling system that ingests real time weather data and produces forecasts for sub-kilometer scale phenomena. The MM5 has data ingest capabilities but is not designed for these scales. Here, initial tests of the efficacy of the MM5 at multiple resolutions are examined. In addition, sensitivities to land-use options and physics schemes, both of which are important to fine-scale battlefield analyses and predictions, are explored.

At various resolutions, the MM5 exhibits significant changes in the detail of the fields. For the case studied here, changes in the precipitation fields are significant, with more defined convection at higher resolutions. In the land use experiements, the areas of convection changed, with precipitation developing and moving over different areas. The physics experiements exhibited dramatic changes in the precipitation and specific humidity fields. Possible origins for these sensitivities and comparisions to observations are considered.