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Hydrological issues in lateral boundary conditions for regional climate modeling: simulation of east asian summer monsoon in 1998

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Abstract

The atmospheric branch of the hydrological cycle associated with the East Asian summer monsoon is intricate due to its distinct land-sea configurations: the highest mountains are to its west, the oceans are to its south and east, and mid-latitude influences come from its north. Here we use the weather research and forecast (WRF) model to demonstrate that using two different large-scale driving fields, derived from the NCEP/DOE R2 and ERA40 reanalysis data and the same model configuration yielded remarkable differences. We found that the differences are primarily caused by uncertainties in the water vapor influx across the lateral boundaries in the reanalyses. The summer-mean water vapor convergence into the model domain computed from the ERA40 reanalysis is 47% higher than that from the R2 reanalysis. The largest uncertainties in moisture transport are found in the regions of the Philippine Sea and the Bay of Bengal, where the moisture transport has the most significant impacts on the East Asian summer monsoon rainfall distribution. The sensitivity test results suggest that the biases in the seasonal mean, seasonal march of the rain band, and individual rainfall events may be reduced by using an “ensemble” average of R2 and ERA40 as lateral boundary forcing. While the large-scale forcing field does not conserve water vapor, the WRF simulation conserves water vapor in the inner model domain. The regional model simulation has corrected the biases in the total amount and the month-to-month distribution of precipitation in the large-scale driving field. However, RCM’s daily precipitation is poorer than that in the reanalysis filed. Since the RCM solutions may sensitively depend on the reanalysis forcing, intercomparison of models’ performance based on a single set of the reanalysis may not be reliable. This calls for attention to reshape our strategy for validation of RCMs.

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Acknowledgments

The authors appreciate Dr. Ruby Leung and Dr. Markus Jochum and anonymous reviewers for their comments on an early version of the manuscript, which leads to an improved version. This research was supported by a NASA grant to the International Pacific Research Center (IPRC). IPRC is sponsored in part by Frontier Research Center for Global Change. The authors appreciate discussions with Yuqing Wang and Qinghua Ding. The first author acknowledges support from NSF Climate Dynamics program Award ATM03-29531. This is SOEST publication 7373 and IPRC publication 512.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. International Pacific Research Center and Department of Meteorology, School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, University of Hawaii, Honolulu, HI, 96822, USA

    Bin Wang & Hongwei Yang

  2. LASG, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Bei**g, China

    Hongwei Yang

  3. College of Physical Oceanography and Environment, Ocean University of China, 266100, Qingdao, China

    Bin Wang

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Correspondence to Bin Wang.

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Wang, B., Yang, H. Hydrological issues in lateral boundary conditions for regional climate modeling: simulation of east asian summer monsoon in 1998. Clim Dyn 31, 477–490 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-008-0385-7

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