Identification

Title

Impact of microphysics scheme complexity on the propagation of initial perturbations

Abstract

The study of evolution characteristics of initial perturbations is an important subject in four-dimensional variational data assimilation (4DVAR) and mesoscale predictability research. This paper evaluates the impact of microphysical scheme complexity on the propagation of the perturbations in initial conditions for warm-season convections over the central United States. The Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF), in conjunction with four schemes of the Morrison microphysics parameterization with varying complexity, was used to simulate convective cases using grids nested to 5-km horizontal grid spacing. Results indicate that, on average, the four schemes show similar perturbation evolution in amplitude and spatial pattern during the first 2 h. After that, the simplified schemes introduce significant error in amplitude and spatial pattern. The simplest (liquid only) and most complex schemes show almost the same growth rate of initial perturbations with different amplitudes during 6-h forecast, suggesting that the simplest scheme does not reduce the nonlinearity in the most complex scheme. The evolution of vertical velocity and total condensates is more nonlinear than horizontal wind, temperature, and humidity, which suggest that the observations of cloud variables and vertical velocity should have a shorter time window (less than 1 h) compared to horizontal wind, temperature, and humidity observations. The simplified liquid-only microphysics scheme can be used as an acceptable substitute for the more complex one with a short time window (less than 1 h).

Resource type

document

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http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7fj2hjt

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

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Classification of spatial data and services

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geoscientificInformation

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title

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reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

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publication

effective date

2012-07-01T00:00:00Z

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Copyright 2012 American Meteorological Society (AMS). Permission to use figures, tables, and brief excerpts from this work in scientific and educational works is hereby granted provided that the source is acknowledged. Any use of material in this work that is determined to be "fair use" under Section 107 or that satisfies the conditions specified in Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law (17 USC, as revised by P.L. 94-553) does not require the Society's permission. Republication, systematic reproduction, posting in electronic form on servers, or other uses of this material, except as exempted by the above statements, requires written permission or license from the AMS. Additional details are provided in the AMS Copyright Policies, available from the AMS at 617-227-2425 or amspubs@ametsoc.org. Permission to place a copy of this work on this server has been provided by the AMS. The AMS does not guarantee that the copy provided here is an accurate copy of the published work.

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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

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pointOfContact

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