Computational and Information Sciences Directorate Research Areas

Land surface effects on meso-gamma scale numerical atmospheric modeling using WRF

Advisor:  EM Measure (edward.m.measure.civ@mail.mil)
White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico

Key words: Numerical modeling; Meso-gamma scale; Meteorology; Atmospheric modeling; WRF; Surface initial conditions; Land surface effects;

Opportunities exist to study the evolution and predictability of atmospheric systems resolvable at Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) horizontal grid spacings of 300 meters to 3 kilometers. The default land surface of the WRF Pre-Processing System (WPS) is about 1 km resolution and the initial values for fields like soil moisture, lake temperature, and snow cover are from external models such as the North American Mesoscale (NAM) Model. The field values generated from such models are coarse for initializing WRF sub-kilometer nests, which leads to errors in phase/space predictions of sea/valley breeze evolution, thunderstorm initiation, etc. Field programs (e.g., T-REX, CASES-99) can be used for evaluating select events. Research will require knowledge of land surface initialization/modeling processes in WRF and high-performance parallel computing.