Identification

Title

Improved simulation of extreme precipitation in a high-resolution atmosphere model

Abstract

Climate models often underestimate the magnitude of extreme precipitation. We compare the performance of a high-resolution (∼0.25°) time-slice atmospheric simulation (1979–2005) of the Community Earth System Model 1.0 in representing daily extreme precipitation events against those of the same model at lower resolutions (∼1° and 2°). We find significant increases in the simulated levels of daily extreme precipitation over Europe, the United States, and Australia. In many cases the increase in high percentiles (>95th) of daily precipitation leads to better agreement with observational data sets. For lower percentiles, we find that increasing resolution does not significantly increase values of simulated precipitation. We argue that the reduced biases mainly result from the higher resolution models resolving more key physical processes controlling heavy precipitation. We conclude that while high resolution is vital for accurately simulating extreme precipitation, considerable biases remain at the highest available model resolutions.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7qz2bwv

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2013-11-16T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact