EMS Annual Meeting Abstracts
Vol. 20, EMS2023-433, 2023, updated on 06 Jul 2023
https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2023-433
EMS Annual Meeting 2023
© Author(s) 2023. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Added value of WRF as a convection permitting regional climate model in simulating precipitation over a mountain region in Southern Europe

Matilde García-Valdecasas Ojeda1,2, Feliciano Solano-Farías1, David Donaire-Montaño1, Luna Cepeda-Ventura1, Emilio Romero-Jiménez1, Juan José Rosa-Cánovas1,2, Yolanda Castro-Díez1,2, Sonia Gámiz-Fortis1,2, and María Jesús Esteban-Parra1,2
Matilde García-Valdecasas Ojeda et al.
  • 1Universidad de Granada, Dpto Física Aplicada, Granada, Spain (esteban@ugr.es)
  • 2Instituto Interuniversitario de Investigación del Sistema Tierra En Andalucía (IISTA-CEAMA)

The climate of Sierra Nevada affects many relevant aspects for the living systems that inhabit it as well as the water resources of a region with semi-arid characteristics. Climate change in the Sierra Nevada can be especially exacerbated by its condition of mountainous region and its location in the Mediterranean area, which makes it a double climate change hotspot. Monitoring and studyng its present and future climate are crucial to define adaptation strategies to climate change and the use of very high-resolution regional models becomes a useful tool in this area of complex topography.

In this work we evaluate climate simulations at a resolution of 1 km using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model as a convection permitting model and we analyze the added value of these simulations with respect to another with a resolution of 5 km for the Sierra Nevada area. The simulations cover the period 2001-2020 and the analysis focuses on the study of precipitation. The simulated precipitation is compared with observational data mainly from the Climanevada database (https://climanevada.obsnev.es/).

In addition to analyzing the mean precipitation values and some extreme indices, the evaluation is also focused on the comparison of the simulated data for some extreme events in order to analyze both the increasing improvement in the spatial and temporal resolutions.

Keywords: Sierra Nevada, precipitation, WRF, convection permitting model, added value.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This research was financed by the project “Thematic Center on Mountain Ecosystem & Remote sensing, Deep learning-AIe-Services University of Granada-SierraNevada” (LifeWatch-2019-10-UGR-01), which has been co-funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation through the FEDER funds from the Spanish Pluriregional Operational Program2014-2020 (POPE), LifeWatch-ERIC action line, the project P20_00035 funded by FEDER/Junta de Andalucía-Consejería de Transformación Económica, Industria, Conocimiento y Universidades, and by the project PID2021-126401OB-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/ 10.13039/501100011033/FEDER Una manera de hacer Europa.

How to cite: García-Valdecasas Ojeda, M., Solano-Farías, F., Donaire-Montaño, D., Cepeda-Ventura, L., Romero-Jiménez, E., Rosa-Cánovas, J. J., Castro-Díez, Y., Gámiz-Fortis, S., and Esteban-Parra, M. J.: Added value of WRF as a convection permitting regional climate model in simulating precipitation over a mountain region in Southern Europe, EMS Annual Meeting 2023, Bratislava, Slovakia, 4–8 Sep 2023, EMS2023-433, https://doi.org/10.5194/ems2023-433, 2023.