EGU21-229
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-229
EGU General Assembly 2021
© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

On the effective resolution of WRF simulations at microscale grid resolution.

Pedro Bolgiani1, Javier Díaz-Fernández1, Lara Quitián-Hernández1, Mariano Sastre1,2, Daniel Santos-Muñoz3, José Ignacio Farrán2, Juan Jesús González-Alemán1, Francisco Valero1, and María Luisa Martín2
Pedro Bolgiani et al.
  • 1Department of Earth Physics and Astrophysics, Faculty of Physics. Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain.
  • 2Department of Applied Mathematics, Faculty of Computer Engineering. Universidad de Valladolid, Segovia, Spain.
  • 3High Resolution Limited Area Model Consortium (HIRLAM). Agencia Estatal de Meteorología (AEMET), Madrid, Spain.

As the computational capacity has been largely improved in the last decades, the grid configuration of numerical weather prediction models has stepped into microscale resolutions. Even if mesoscale models are not originally designed to reproduce fine scale phenomena, a large effort is being made by the research community to improve and adapt these systems. However, reasonable doubts exist regarding the ability of the models to forecast this type of events, due to the unfit parametrizations and the appearance of instabilities and lack of sensitivity in the variables. Here, the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model effective resolution is evaluated for several situations and grid resolutions. This is achieved by assessing the curve of dissipation for the wind kinetic energy. Results show that the simulated energy spectrum responds to different synoptic conditions. Nevertheless, when the model is forced into microscale grid resolutions the dissipation curves present an unrealistic atmospheric energy. This may be a partial explanation to the aforementioned issues and imposes a large uncertainty to forecasting at these resolutions.

How to cite: Bolgiani, P., Díaz-Fernández, J., Quitián-Hernández, L., Sastre, M., Santos-Muñoz, D., Farrán, J. I., González-Alemán, J. J., Valero, F., and Martín, M. L.: On the effective resolution of WRF simulations at microscale grid resolution., EGU General Assembly 2021, online, 19–30 Apr 2021, EGU21-229, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-229, 2020.

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