Dynamic downscaling of near-surface air temperature at the basin scale using WRF–a case study in the Heihe River Basin, China

Abstract

The spatial resolution of general circulation models (GCMs) is too coarse to represent regional climate variations at the regional, basin, and local scales required for many environmental modeling and impact assessments. Weather research and forecasting model (WRF) is a next-generation, fully compressible, Euler non-hydrostatic mesoscale forecast model with a run-time hydrostatic option. This model is useful for downscaling weather and climate at the scales from one kilometer to thousands of kilometers, and is useful for deriving meteorological parameters required for hydrological simulation too. The objective of this paper is to validate WRF simulating 5 km/1 h air temperatures by daily observed data of China Meteorological Administration (CMA) stations, and by hourly in-situ data of the Watershed Allied Telemetry Experimental Research Project. The daily validation shows that the WRF simulation has good agreement with the observed data; the R² between the WRF simulation and each station is more than 0.93; the absolute of meanbias error (MBE) for each station is less than 2°C; and the MBEs of Ejina, Mazongshan and Alxa stations are near zero, with R² is more than 0.98, which can be taken as an unbiased estimation. The hourly validation shows that the WRF simulation can capture the basic trend of observed data, the MBE of each site is approximately 2°C, the R² of each site is more than 0.80, with the highest at 0.95, and the computed and observed surface air temperature series show a significantly similar trend.

Keywords

weather research and forecasting model / dynamic downscaling / surface air temperature / Heihe River Basin / Watershed Allied Telemetry Experimental Research Project

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 40901202, 40925004), and the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2009AA122104). The input data for WRF model are from the Research Data Archive (RDA) which is maintained by the Computational and Information Systems Laboratory (CISL) at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). The original data are available from the RDA (http://dss.ucar.edu) in Dataset No. ds083.2.

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