A Regional Climate Model Laboratory for Understanding Coastal Climate

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Travis O'Brien ◽  
Thomas Burkle ◽  
Michael Krauter ◽  
Thomas Trapp
Keyword(s):  
Steady State ◽  
Regional Climate Model ◽  
Climate Model ◽  
Regional Climate ◽  
Cloud Fraction ◽  
Theoretical Physics ◽  
Coastal Regions ◽  
Local Climate ◽  
Coastal Climate ◽  
Mean Climate

<p>Midlatitude western coastal regions are recognized as being important for the global energy cycle, marine and terrestrial biodiversity, and regional economies.  These coastal regions exhibit a rich range of weather and climate phenomena, including persistent stratocumulus clouds, sea-breeze circulations, coastally-trapped Kelvin waves, and wind-driven upwelling. During the summer season, when impacts from transient synoptic systems are relatively reduced, the local climate is governed by a complex set of interactions among the atmosphere, land, and ocean.  This complexity has so far inhibited basic understanding of the drivers of western coastal climate, climate variability, and climate change.</p><p>As a way of simplifying the system, we have developed a hierarchical regional climate model experimental framework focused on the western United States. We modify the International Centre for Theoretical Physics RegCM4 to use steady-state initial, lateral, and top-of-model boundary conditions: average July insolation (no diurnal cycle) and average meteorological state (winds, temperature, humidity, surface pressure).  This July <em>Base State</em> simulation rapidly reaches a steady state solution that closely resembles the observed mean climate and the mean climate achieved using RegCM4 in a standard reanalysis-driven configuration.  It is particularly notable that the near-coastal stratocumulus field is spatially similar to the satellite-observed stratocumulus field during arbitrary July days: including gaps in stratocumulus coverage downwind of capes. We run similar <em>Base State</em> simulations for the other calendar months and find that these simulations mimic the annual cycle.  This suggests that the summer coastal stratocumulus field results from the steady-state response of the marine boundary layer to summertime climatological forcing; if true for the real world, this would imply that stratocumulus cloud fraction, within a given month, is temporally modulated by deviations from the summer base state (e.g., transient synoptic disturbances that interrupt the cloud field).  We describe modifications to this simplified experimental framework aimed at understanding the factors that govern stratocumulus cloud fraction and its variability.</p>

scholarly journals The Cloud_cci simulator for the ESA Cloud_cci climate data record and its application to a global and a regional climate model

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Salomon Eliasson ◽  
Karl Göran Karlsson ◽  
Erik van Meijgaard ◽  
Jan Fokke Meirink ◽  
Martin Stengel ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Regional Climate Model ◽  
Climate Model ◽  
Regional Climate ◽  
Cloud Fraction ◽  
Climate Data ◽  
European Continent ◽  
Cloud Properties ◽  
Data Record ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Climate Data Record

Abstract. The Cloud_cci satellite simulator has been developed to enable comparisons between the Cloud_cci Climate Data Record (CDR) and climate models. The Cloud_cci simulator is applied here to the EC-Earth Global Climate Model as well as the RACMO Regional Climate Model. We demonstrate the importance of using a satellite simulator that emulates the retrieval process underlying the CDR as opposed to taking the model output directly. The impact of not sampling the model at the local overpass time of the polar-orbiting satellites used to make the dataset was shown to be large, yielding up to 100 % error in Liquid Water Path (LWP) simulations in certain regions. The simulator removes all clouds with optical thickness smaller than 0.2 to emulate the Cloud_cci CDR's lack of sensitivity to very thin clouds. This reduces Total Cloud Fraction (TCF) globally by about 10 % for EC-Earth and by a few percent for RACMO over Europe. Globally, compared to the Cloud_cci CDR, EC-Earth is shown to be mostly in agreement on the distribution of clouds and their height, but it generally underestimates the high cloud fraction associated with tropical convection regions, and overestimates the occurrence and height of clouds over the Sahara and the Arabian sub-continent. In RACMO, TCF is higher than retrieved over the northern Atlantic Ocean, but lower than retrieved over the European continent, where in addition the Cloud Top Pressure (CTP) is underestimated. The results shown here demonstrate again that a simulator is needed to make meaningful comparisons between modelled and retrieved cloud properties. It is promising to see that for (nearly) all cloud properties the simulator improves the agreement of the model with the satellite data.

Impact of different and time-varying land cover data sets in a regional climate model on regional and local climate over Europe

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mingyue Zhang ◽  
Jürgen Helmert ◽  
Merja Tölle
Keyword(s):  
Land Cover ◽  
Regional Climate Model ◽  
Climate Model ◽  
Regional Climate ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Time Varying ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Local Climate ◽  
Land Cover Data ◽  
Simulation Results

<p>According to IPCC, Land use and Land Cover (LC) changes have a key role to adapt and mitigate future climate change aiming to stabilize temperature rise up to 2°C. Land surface change at regional scale is associated to global climate change, such as global warming. It influences the earth’s water and energy cycles via influences on the heat, moisture and momentum transfer, and on the chemical composition of the atmosphere. These effects show variations due to different LC types, and due to their spatial and temporal resolutions.  Thus, we incorporate a new time-varying land cover data set based on ESACCI into the regional climate model COSMO-CLM(v5.0). Further, the impact on the regional and local climate is compared to the standard operational LC data of GLC2000 and GlobCover 2009. Convection-permitting simulations with the three land cover data sets are performed at 0.0275° horizontal resolution over Europe for the time period from 1992 to 2015.</p><p>Overall, the simulation results show comparable agreement to observations. However, the simulation results based on GLC2000 and GlobCover 2009 (with 23 LC types) LC data sets show a fluctuation of 0.5K in temperature and 5% of precipitation. Even though the LC is classified into the same types, the difference in LC distribution and fraction leads to variations in climate simulation results. Using all of the 37 LC types of the ESACCI-LC data set show noticeable differences in distribution of temperature and precipitation compared to the simulations with GLC2000 and GlobCover 2009. Especially in forest areas, slight differences of the plant cover type (e.g. Evergreen or Deciduous) could result in up to 10% differences (increase or decrease) in temperature and precipitation over the simulation domain. Our results demonstrate how LC changes as well as different land cover type effect regional climate. There is need for proper and time-varying land cover data sets for regional climate model studies. The approach of including ESACCI-LC data set into regional climate model simulations also improved the external data generation system.</p><p>We anticipate this research to be a starting point for involving time-varying LC data sets into regional climate models. Furthermore, it will give us a possibility to quantify the effect of time-varying LC data on regional climate accurately.</p><p><strong>Acknowledgement</strong>:</p><p>1: Computational resources were made available by the German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ) through support from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research in Germany (BMBF). We acknowledge the funding of the German Research Foundation (DFG) through grant NR. 401857120.</p><p>2: Appreciation for the support of Jürg Luterbacher and Eva Nowatzki.</p><p> </p>

Impacts of different RCP scenarios on ALADIN-Climate regional climate model projections over Hungary

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beatrix Bán ◽  
Gabriella Zsebeházi
Keyword(s):  
Regional Climate Model ◽  
Climate Model ◽  
Regional Climate ◽  
Horizontal Resolution ◽  
Observation Data ◽  
Rcp Scenarios ◽  
Local Climate ◽  
Temperature And Precipitation ◽  
Local Climate Change ◽  
Primary Basis

<p>The KlimAdat national project was started in 2016 to create a complex database of detailed meteorological information aiming to support local climate change impact studies in different sectors, adaptation strategies and related decision making. Besides observation data its primary basis will be ALADIN-Climate and REMO regional climate model simulations achieved by the Hungarian Meteorological Service and this set of projections will be extended by members of the Euro-CORDEX ensemble in order to quantify the projection uncertainties. <br>This study is focusing on analysis of the ALADIN-Climate model projections driven with RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 scenarios. Firstly, the CNRM-CM5 global model outputs were downscaled to 50 km horizontal resolution over the EURO-CORDEX domain with ALADIN-Climate Version 5.2. Then using these  results as lateral boundary conditions, 10 km experiments were prepared on a domain covering Central and South-Eastern Europe.<br>The presentation aims to introduce the behaviour of these simulations achieved by different scenarios and at different spatial resolution from the aspect of temperature and precipitation change over Hungary. Special attention will be put on the differences in extreme indices. Finally, our 10 km resolution simulations are compared with EURO-CORDEX results to specify their place in a larger ensemble.</p>

scholarly journals The Cloud_cci simulator v1.0 for the Cloud_cci climate data record and its application to a global and a regional climate model

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 829-847 ◽  
Author(s):  
Salomon Eliasson ◽  
Karl Göran Karlsson ◽  
Erik van Meijgaard ◽  
Jan Fokke Meirink ◽  
Martin Stengel ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Regional Climate Model ◽  
Climate Model ◽  
Regional Climate ◽  
Cloud Fraction ◽  
Climate Data ◽  
European Continent ◽  
Cloud Properties ◽  
Data Record ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Climate Data Record

Abstract. The Cloud Climate Change Initiative (Cloud_cci) satellite simulator has been developed to enable comparisons between the Cloud_cci climate data record (CDR) and climate models. The Cloud_cci simulator is applied here to the EC-Earth global climate model as well as the Regional Atmospheric Climate Model (RACMO) regional climate model. We demonstrate the importance of using a satellite simulator that emulates the retrieval process underlying the CDR as opposed to taking the model output directly. The impact of not sampling the model at the local overpass time of the polar-orbiting satellites used to make the dataset was shown to be large, yielding up to 100 % error in liquid water path (LWP) simulations in certain regions. The simulator removes all clouds with optical thickness smaller than 0.2 to emulate the Cloud_cci CDR's lack of sensitivity to very thin clouds. This reduces total cloud fraction (TCF) globally by about 10 % for EC-Earth and by a few percent for RACMO over Europe. Globally, compared to the Cloud_cci CDR, EC-Earth is shown to be mostly in agreement on the distribution of clouds and their height, but it generally underestimates the high cloud fraction associated with tropical convection regions, and overestimates the occurrence and height of clouds over the Sahara and the Arabian subcontinent. In RACMO, TCF is higher than retrieved over the northern Atlantic Ocean but lower than retrieved over the European continent, where in addition the cloud top pressure (CTP) is underestimated. The results shown here demonstrate again that a simulator is needed to make meaningful comparisons between modeled and retrieved cloud properties. It is promising to see that for (nearly) all cloud properties the simulator improves the agreement of the model with the satellite data.

scholarly journals Simulation of Rainfall over Bangladesh Using Regional Climate Model (RegCM4.7)

Jalawaayu ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Muhammad Tanjilur Rahman ◽  
Md. Nazmul Ahasan ◽  
Md. Abdul Mannan ◽  
Madan Sigdel ◽  
Dibas Shrestha ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Regional Climate Model ◽  
Bias Correction ◽  
Climate Model ◽  
Regional Climate ◽  
Rainfall Simulation ◽  
Theoretical Physics ◽  
Convective Precipitation ◽  
Annual Rainfall ◽  
Linear Scaling ◽  
Simulated Rainfall

Regional climate model is a scientific tool to monitor present climate change and to provide reliable estimation of future climate projection. In this study, the Regional Climate Model version 4.7 (RegCM4.7) developed by International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) has been adopted to simulate rainfall scenario of Bangladesh. The study examines model performance of rainfall simulation through the period of 1991-2018 with ERA-Interim75 data of 75 km horizontal resolution as lateral boundaries, downscaled at 25km resolution using the mixed convective precipitation scheme; MIT-Emanuel scheme over land and Grell scheme with Fritsch-Chappell closure over ocean. The simulated rainfall has been compared both at spatial and temporal scales (monthly, seasonal and annual) with observed data collected from Bangladesh Meteorological Department (BMD) and Climate Research Unit (CRU). Simulated annual rainfall showed that the model overestimated in most of the years. Overestimation has been observed in the monsoon and underestimation in pre-monsoon and post-monsoon seasons. Spatial distribution of simulated rainfall depicts overestimation in the southeast coastal region and underestimation in the northwest and northeast border regions of Bangladesh. Better estimation of rainfall has been found in the central and eastern parts of the country. The simulated annual rainfall has been validated through the Linear Scaling bias correction method for the years of 2016, 2017, and 2018 considering the rainfall of 1991-2015 as reference. The bias correction with linear scaling method gives fairly satisfactory results and it can be considered in the future projection of rainfall over Bangladesh.

Mean climate and representation of jet streams in the CORDEX South Asia simulations by the regional climate model RCA4

2016 ◽  
Vol 129 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 1-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. Iqbal ◽  
F. S. Syed ◽  
H Sajjad ◽  
G. Nikulin ◽  
E. Kjellström ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Regional Climate Model ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Climate Model ◽  
Regional Climate ◽  
Jet Streams ◽  
Mean Climate

scholarly journals Implementation and evaluation of online gas-phase chemistry within a regional climate model (RegCM-CHEM4)

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 741-760 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Shalaby ◽  
A. S. Zakey ◽  
A. B. Tawfik ◽  
F. Solmon ◽  
F. Giorgi ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Regional Climate Model ◽  
Gas Phase ◽  
Heat Wave ◽  
Climate Model ◽  
Regional Climate ◽  
Theoretical Physics ◽  
Analysis Model ◽  
Gas Phase Chemistry ◽  
Ozone Concentrations ◽  
Phase Chemistry

Abstract. The RegCM-CHEM4 is a new online climate-chemistry model based on the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) regional climate model (RegCM4). Tropospheric gas-phase chemistry is integrated into the climate model using the condensed version of the Carbon Bond Mechanism (CBM-Z; Zaveri and Peters, 1999) with a fast solver based on radical balances. We evaluate the model over continental Europe for two different time scales: (1) an event-based analysis of the ozone episode associated with the heat wave of August 2003 and (2) a climatological analysis of a six-year simulation (2000–2005). For the episode analysis, model simulations show good agreement with European Monitoring and Evaluation Programme (EMEP) observations of hourly ozone over different regions in Europe and capture ozone concentrations during and after the summer 2003 heat wave event. For long-term climate simulations, the model captures the seasonal cycle of ozone concentrations with some over prediction of ozone concentrations in non-heat wave summers. Overall, the ozone and ozone precursor evaluation shows the feasibility of using RegCM-CHEM4 for decadal-length simulations of chemistry-climate interactions.

scholarly journals Regional Climate Modeling for the Developing World: The ICTP RegCM3 and RegCNET

2007 ◽  
Vol 88 (9) ◽  
pp. 1395-1410 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy S. Pal ◽  
Filippo Giorgi ◽  
Xunqiang Bi ◽  
Nellie Elguindi ◽  
Fabien Solmon ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Regional Climate Model ◽  
Climate Models ◽  
Climate Model ◽  
Climate Modeling ◽  
Regional Climate ◽  
Regional Climate Models ◽  
Regional Climate Modeling ◽  
Theoretical Physics ◽  
Research Network ◽  
Diverse Range

Regional climate models are important research tools available to scientists around the world, including in economically developing nations (EDNs). The Earth Systems Physics (ESP) group of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) maintains and distributes a state-of-the-science regional climate model called the ICTP Regional Climate Model version 3 (RegCM3), which is currently being used by a large research community for a diverse range of climate-related studies. The RegCM3 is the central, but not only, tool of the ICTP-maintained Regional Climate Research Network (RegCNET) aimed at creating south–south and north–south scientific interactions on the topic of climate and associated impacts research and modeling. In this paper, RegCNET, RegCM3, and illustrative results from RegCM3 benchmark simulations applied over south Asia, Africa, and South America are presented. It is shown that RegCM3 performs reasonably well over these regions and is therefore useful for climate studies in EDNs.

Future response of precipitation extremes over the Nordic region in a convection-permitting regional climate model

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Petter Lind ◽  
Danijel Belušić ◽  
Erik Kjellström ◽  
Fuxing Wang ◽  
Erika Toivonen ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
High Resolution ◽  
Regional Climate Model ◽  
Boundary Data ◽  
Climate Models ◽  
Climate Model ◽  
Regional Climate ◽  
Precipitation Extremes ◽  
Grid Spacing ◽  
Local Climate ◽  
Nordic Region

<p>There is an increased need for more detailed climate information from impact researchers, stakeholders and policy makers for regional-to-local climate change assessments. In order to design relevant and informative planning strategies on these scales it is important to have reliable climate data and information on high spatial O(1km) and temporal (daily to sub-daily) scales. Such high-resolution data is also beneficial for climate impact modellers as input to their models, e.g. hydrological or urban models that operate on regional to local scales. It has been established that regional climate models (RCMs) provide added value compared to coarser global climate models (GCMs) or re-analysis (e.g. ERA-Interim). However, RCMs with standard spatial resolution O(10 − 50km) still suffer from inadequacies in representing important regional-to-local climate phenomena and characteristics, both from the implied ”smoothening” effect within each grid cell which limits the representation of fine scale surface forcings, and the need to parameterize small-scale processes like atmospheric convection. The latter particularly invokes uncertainties in future climate responses of short-duration precipitation extremes such as flash-floods. Here, we compare 20-year simulations with a very high resolution (3 km grid spacing) convection permitting regional climate model (CPRCM) with a standard high-resolution (12 km grid spacing) convection parameterized RCM and their abilities to simulate the climate characteristics of the Nordic region in Europe, with particular focus on precipitation extremes. The study covers both recent past (with boundary data from ERA-Interim and the EC-Earth GCM) and the end of the 21st century (boundary data from EC-Earth using the RCP8.5 radiative forcing scenario). The high model grid resolution combined with the extensive simulated time period which enables assessment on climatological time scales makes this study one of very few for this region.</p>

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