Towards climate simulations at cloud-resolving scales

Hohenegger, Cathy; Brockhaus, Peter; Schär, Christoph

doi:10.1127/0941-2948/2008/0303

Cited by 175 publications

(160 citation statements)

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“…Results with convection-permitting simulations indicate improved spatio-temporal characteristics of heavy hourly events (Ban et al 2014;Chan et al 2014b), and a better scaling with temperature (Ban et al 2014). Further, the convection-permitting approach improves the simulation of the diurnal cycle of summer precipitation (Hohenegger et al 2008;Prein et al 2013). Tölle et al (2014) demonstrated that the influence of land use/cover change is more pronounced when considering the convection-permitting scale, suggesting that local effects of land management are more important than previously thought.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 62%

“…To date, the application of convection-permitting models in climate studies is limited, and is typically restricted to relatively small domains (Knote et al 2010;Prein et al 2013;Tölle et al 2014;Gutjahr et al 2016). Often, only a few summer seasons (Hohenegger et al 2008;Prein et al 2013;Lind et al 2016) are investigated because of computational constraints. The immense computational costs are inherent with climate simulations at convection-permitting scale.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Scale dependency of regional climate modeling of current and future climate extremes in Germany

Tölle

Schefczyk

Gutjahr

2017

Theor Appl Climatol

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A warmer climate is projected for mid-Europe, with less precipitation in summer, but with intensified extremes of precipitation and near-surface temperature. However, the extent and magnitude of such changes are associated with creditable uncertainty because of the limitations of model resolution and parameterizations. Here, we present the results of convection-permitting regional climate model simulations for Germany integrated with the COSMO-CLM using a horizontal grid spacing of 1.3 km, and additional 4.5-and 7-km simulations with convection parameterized. Of particular interest is how the temperature and precipitation fields and their extremes depend on the horizontal resolution for current and future climate conditions. The spatial variability of precipitation increases with resolution because of more realistic orography and physical parameterizations, but values are overestimated in summer and over mountain ridges in all simulations compared to observations. The spatial variability of temperature is improved at a resolution of 1.3 km, but the results are cold-biased, especially in summer. The increase in resolution from 7/4.5 km to 1.3 km is accompanied by less future warming in summer by 1 Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany precipitation extremes will be more severe, and temperature extremes will not exclusively increase with higher resolution. Although the differences between the resolutions considered (7/4.5 km and 1.3 km) are small, we find that the differences in the changes in extremes are large. High-resolution simulations require further studies, with effective parameterizations and tunings for different topographic regions. Impact models and assessment studies may benefit from such high-resolution model results, but should account for the impact of model resolution on model processes and climate change.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 62%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Scale dependency of regional climate modeling of current and future climate extremes in Germany

Tölle

Schefczyk

Gutjahr

2017

Theor Appl Climatol

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“…The simulations mimic the conditions during convectively active flat-pressure synoptic situations, which may persist over several days in midlatitude regions, as for example in July 2006 over mid Europe (Hohenegger et al, 2008) or in summertime in the southeastern USA (Garrett, 1982). Sensitivity of precipitation to soil moisture appears to be large in such conditions.…”

Section: Copyright C 2012 Royal Meteorological Societymentioning

confidence: 99%

Diurnal equilibrium convection and land surface–atmosphere interactions in an idealized cloud‐resolving model

Schlemmer

Hohenegger

Schmidli

et al. 2012

Quart J Royal Meteoro Soc

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The influence of soil moisture and atmospheric stability on mid-latitude diurnal convection and land-atmosphere exchange is investigated in an idealized cloudresolving modelling framework using a full set of parametrization schemes. In each member of a series of month-long experiments, the model attains a state where deep, precipitating convection is triggered every day. This state is referred to as equilibrium diurnal convection. The triggering occurs via different mechanisms depending on the atmosphere-soil setting. In our framework latent heat fluxes comprise the primary control over the precipitation amounts. We find that evaporation is regulated by the availability of energy on the one hand and the availability of soil moisture and the near-surface saturation deficit of the atmosphere on the other. Increased cloud cover over wet soils reduces net short-wave radiation but increases net long-wave radiation, leading to a near-compensation of the two effects on available energy. Increased boundary layer moisture is removed by deep convection, thus increasing the near-surface saturation deficit and preventing a negative feedback of boundary layer moisture content on the latent heat fluxes. We also find that there is a spatial correlation between soil moisture and precipitation anomalies, suggesting that the soil moisture precipitation feedback acts on a scale of 10-50 km. Copyright c 2012 Royal Meteorological Society Key Words: convection; cloud-resolving modelling; land-surface atmosphere interactions

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“…GCMs also remain important for providing initial and boundary conditions for RCMs (e.g. Kendon et al, 2010), which now yield kilometre-scale climate simulations (Hohenegger et al, 2008;Kendon et al, 2014;Prein et al, 2015), allowing for convection-permitting simulations crucial for representing, in particular, sub-daily precipitation extremes Kendon et al, 2017) and the soil moistureprecipitation feedback (Hohenegger et al, 2009).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mean and extreme precipitation over European river basins better simulated in a 25 km AGCM

Schiemann

Vidale

Shaffrey

et al. 2018

Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci.

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Abstract. Limited spatial resolution is one of the factors that may hamper applications of global climate models (GCMs), in particular over Europe with its complex coastline and orography. In this study, the representation of European mean and extreme precipitation is evaluated in simulations with an atmospheric GCM (AGCM) at different resolutions between about 135 and 25 km grid spacing in the mid-latitudes. The continent-wide root-mean-square error in mean precipitation in the 25 km model is about 25 % smaller than in the 135 km model in winter. Clear improvements are also seen in autumn and spring, whereas the model's sensitivity to resolution is very small in summer. Extreme precipitation is evaluated by estimating generalised extreme value distributions (GEVs) of daily precipitation aggregated over river basins whose surface area is greater than 50 000 km 2 . GEV location and scale parameters are measures of the typical magnitude and of the interannual variability of extremes, respectively. Median model biases in both these parameters are around 10 % in summer and around 20 % in the other seasons. For some river basins, however, these biases can be much larger and take values between 50 % and 100 %. Extreme precipitation is better simulated in the 25 km model, especially during autumn when the median GEV parameter biases are more than halved, and in the North European Plains, from the Loire in the west to the Vistula in the east. A sensitivity experiment is conducted showing that these resolution sensitivities in both mean and extreme precipitation are in many areas primarily due to the increase in resolution of the model orography. The findings of this study illustrate the improved capability of a global high-resolution model in simulating European mean and extreme precipitation.

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Towards climate simulations at cloud-resolving scales

Cited by 175 publications

References 0 publications

Scale dependency of regional climate modeling of current and future climate extremes in Germany

Scale dependency of regional climate modeling of current and future climate extremes in Germany

Diurnal equilibrium convection and land surface–atmosphere interactions in an idealized cloud‐resolving model

Mean and extreme precipitation over European river basins better simulated in a 25 km AGCM

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