An Evaluation of Five ARW-WRF Microphysics Schemes Using Synthetic GOES Imagery for an Atmospheric River Event Affecting the California Coast

The main purpose of the present study is to assess the value of synthetic satellite imagery as a tool for model evaluation performance in addition to more traditional approaches. For this purpose, syntheticGOES-10imagery at 10.7μm was produced using output from the Advanced Research Weather Research...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of hydrometeorology 2011-08, Vol.12 (4), p.618-633
Main Authors: Jankov, Isidora, Grasso, Lewis D., Sengupta, Manajit, Neiman, Paul J., Zupanski, Dusanka, Zupanski, Milija, Lindsey, Daniel, Hillger, Donald W., Birkenheuer, Daniel L., Brummer, Renate, Yuan, Huiling
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Atmospherics
Brightness temperature
Clouds
Forecasting models
Freshwater
Hydrometeorology
Microphysics
Modeling
Precipitation
Satellite imaging
Simulations
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:The main purpose of the present study is to assess the value of synthetic satellite imagery as a tool for model evaluation performance in addition to more traditional approaches. For this purpose, syntheticGOES-10imagery at 10.7μm was produced using output from the Advanced Research Weather Research and Forecasting (ARW-WRF) numerical model. Use of synthetic imagery is a unique method to indirectly evaluate the performance of various microphysical schemes available within the ARW-WRF. In the present study, a simulation of an atmospheric river event that occurred on 30 December 2005 was used. The simulations were performed using the ARW-WRF numerical model with five different microphysical schemes [Lin, WRF single-moment 6 class (WSM6), Thompson, Schultz, and double-moment Morrison]. Synthetic imagery was created and scenes from the simulations were statistically compared with observations from the 10.7-μm band of theGOES-10imager using a histogram-based technique. The results suggest that synthetic satellite imagery is useful in model performance evaluations as a complementary metric to those used traditionally. For example, accumulated precipitation analyses and other commonly used fields in model evaluations suggested a good agreement among solutions from various microphysical schemes, while the synthetic imagery analysis pointed toward notable differences in simulations of clouds among the microphysical schemes.
ISSN:1525-755X
1525-7541
DOI:10.1175/2010JHM1282.1