State-of-Art in Regional Climate Models

A special issue of Atmosphere (ISSN 2073-4433). This special issue belongs to the section "Climatology".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 April 2022) | Viewed by 5468

Special Issue Editors

Industrial Ecology Programme (IndEcol), Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), NO-7491 Trondheim, Norway
Interests: interaction between land cover change and climate change; regional climate modelling and climate model intercomparison; Asian monsoon variability and its prediction
Department of Earth Sciences, Uppsala University, 62167 Visby, Sweden
Interests: urban climate; urban heat island; atmospheric environment; wind energy; regional climate modeling
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Mesoscale and Microscale Meteorology Laboratory, National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Boulder, CO 80307, USA
Interests: numerical weather prediction; mid-latitude and tropical convective cloud-scale modeling; hurricane forecasting; regional climate modeling; wind and solar energy relevant model development; large-eddy scale simulation

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue intends to collect the ongoing studies involving the development and application of regional climate models supporting the analysis of climate change at the local level, and development of impact, adaptation and risk studies at different scales. This issue aims to collect the enormous advances made in the context of regional climate models in recent years. Their increasing use in multiple fields of applications is forcing the scientific community working with regional climate models to improve their performance more and more, for example through the implementation of increasingly complex and realistic physical parameterizations and numerical schemes or techniques, such as two-way nesting, and many others. Studies are being developed for the realization of coupling of atmospheric models with soil and hydrology models and/or oceanic models, in order to develop detailed and realistic representation of the entire Earth system. In addition, in recent years, interests have also increased in demonstrating the added value of regional convection permitting climate models, which have characteristics making them even more interesting for impact analysis, but that still require extensive validation using adequate observational datasets.

Moreover, very high resolutions allows improvements also in representation of some large-scale features due to an adequate representation of small-scale processes. Specifically, the benefits of kilometer-scale modeling has been proven in a better representation of diurnal cycles, hourly precipitation intensities, local–regional circulations, urban areas, seasonal average precipitation, convective downdrafts and the representation of cold pools.

Dr. Bo Huang
Dr. Huidong Li
Dr. Jimy Dudhia
Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • assessment of local climate change with the regional climate model
  • evaluation of the extreme regimes with RCMs
  • innovative numerical methods and physical parameterization for RCMs
  • CPM added value
  • regional Climate Model (RCM) data evaluation and post-processing
  • coupled Regional Climate Modelling Systems
  • urban impacts

Published Papers (2 papers)

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Research

17 pages, 12906 KiB  
Article
Current Conditions and Projected Changes in Crop Water Demand, Irrigation Requirement, and Water Availability over West Africa
by Imoleayo Ezekiel Gbode, Gulilat Tefera Diro, Joseph Daniel Intsiful and Jimy Dudhia
Atmosphere 2022, 13(7), 1155; https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos13071155 - 21 Jul 2022
Cited by 4 | Viewed by 1495
Abstract
Climate variability and change greatly affect agricultural and water resource management over West Africa. This paper presents the current characteristics and projected change in regional crop water demand (CWD), irrigation requirement (IR), and water availability (WA) over West Africa. Observed and simulated daily [...] Read more.
Climate variability and change greatly affect agricultural and water resource management over West Africa. This paper presents the current characteristics and projected change in regional crop water demand (CWD), irrigation requirement (IR), and water availability (WA) over West Africa. Observed and simulated daily rainfall, minimum temperature, maximum temperature, and evapotranspiration are used to derive the above agro-meteorological and hydrological variables. For future periods, high-resolution climate data from three regional climate models under two different scenarios, i.e., representative concentration pathway (RCP) 4.5 and 8.5, are considered. Evaluation of the characteristics of present-day CWD, IR, and WA indicated that the ensemble mean of the model-derived outputs reproduced the prevailing spatial patterns of CWD and IR. Moreover, the wetter part of the domain, especially along the southern coast, was correctly delineated from the drier northern regions, despite having biases. The ensemble model also simulated the annual cycle of water supply and the bimodal pattern of the water demand curves correctly. In terms of future projections, the outcomes from the study suggest an average increase in the CWD by up to 0.808 mm/day and IR by 1.244 mm/day towards the end of the twenty-first century, compared to the baseline period. The hot-spot areas, where there is higher projected increment in CWD and IR, are over Senegal, Southern Mali, and Western Burkina Faso. In most cases, WA is projected to decrease towards the end of the twenty-first century by −0.418 mm/day. The largest decline in WA is found to be over Guinea and most of the eastern parts of West Africa. Despite the current under-utilization of the existing groundwater resources, the threat of global warming in reducing future WA and increasing CWD suggested caution on the scale of irrigation schemes and management strategies. The outcomes from the study could be a crucial input for the agricultural and water managers for introducing effective measures to ensure sustainability of irrigated farm lands. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue State-of-Art in Regional Climate Models)
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21 pages, 8632 KiB  
Article
Valley–Mountain Circulation Associated with the Diurnal Cycle of Precipitation in the Tropical Andes (Santa River Basin, Peru)
by Alan G. Rosales, Clementine Junquas, Rosmeri P. da Rocha, Thomas Condom and Jhan-Carlo Espinoza
Atmosphere 2022, 13(2), 344; https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos13020344 - 18 Feb 2022
Cited by 7 | Viewed by 2911
Abstract
The Cordillera Blanca (central Andes of Peru) represents the largest concentration of tropical glaciers in the world. The atmospheric processes related to precipitations are still scarcely studied in this region. The main objective of this study is to understand the atmospheric processes of [...] Read more.
The Cordillera Blanca (central Andes of Peru) represents the largest concentration of tropical glaciers in the world. The atmospheric processes related to precipitations are still scarcely studied in this region. The main objective of this study is to understand the atmospheric processes of interaction between local and regional scales controlling the diurnal cycle of precipitation over the Santa River basin located between the Cordillera Blanca and the Cordillera Negra. The rainy season (December–March) of 2012–2013 is chosen to perform simulations with the WRF (Weather Research and Forecasting) model, with two domains at 6 km (WRF-6 km) and 2 km (WRF-2 km) horizontal resolutions, forced by ERA5. WRF-2 km precipitation shows a clear improvement over WRF-6 km in terms of the daily mean and diurnal cycle, compared to in situ observations. WRF-2 km shows that the moisture from the Pacific Ocean is a key process modulating the diurnal cycle of precipitation over the Santa River basin in interaction with moisture fluxes from the Amazon basin. In particular, a channeling thermally orographic flow is described as controlling the afternoon precipitation along the Santa valley. In addition, in the highest parts of the Santa River basin (in both cordilleras) and the southern part, maximum precipitation occurs earlier than the lowest parts and the bottom of the valley in the central part of the basin, associated with the intensification of the channeling flow by upslope cross-valley winds during mid-afternoon and its decrease during late afternoon/early night. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue State-of-Art in Regional Climate Models)
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