Analysis of the ozone profile specifications in the WRF-ARW model and their impact on the simulation of direct solar radiation
Abstract. Although ozone is an atmospheric gas with high spatial and temporal variability, mesoscale numerical weather prediction (NWP) models simplify the specification of ozone concentrations used in their shortwave schemes by using a few ozone profiles. In this paper, a two-part study is presented: (i) an assessment of the quality of the ozone profiles provided for use with the shortwave schemes in the Advanced Research version of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF-ARW) model and (ii) the impact of deficiencies in those profiles on the performance of model simulations of direct solar radiation. The first part compares simplified datasets used to specify the total ozone column in five schemes (i.e. Goddard, New Goddard, RRTMG, CAM and Fu–Liou–Gu) with the Multi-Sensor Reanalysis dataset during the period 1979–2008 examining the latitudinal, longitudinal and seasonal limitations in the ozone modeling of each parameterization. The results indicate that the maximum deviations are over the poles due to the Brewer–Dobson circulation and there are prominent longitudinal patterns in the departures due to quasi-stationary features forced by the land–sea distribution. In the second part, the bias in the simulated direct solar radiation due to these deviations from the simplified spatial and temporal representation of the ozone distribution is analyzed for the New Goddard and CAM schemes using the Beer–Lambert–Bouger law. For radiative applications those simplifications introduce spatial and temporal biases with near-zero departures over the tropics during all the year and increasing poleward with a maximum in the high middle latitudes during the winter of each hemisphere.