Mapping mean total annual precipitation in Belgium, by investigating the scale of topographic control at the regional scale

Accurate precipitation maps are essential for ecological, environmental, element cycle and hydrological models that have a spatial output component. It is well known that topography has a major influence on the spatial distribution of precipitation and that increasing topographical complexity is associated with increased spatial heterogeneity in precipitation. This means that when mapping precipitation using classical interpolation techniques (e.g. regression, kriging, spline, inverse distance weighting, etc.), a climate measuring network with higher spatial density is needed in mountainous areas in order to obtain the same level of accuracy as compared to flatter regions. In this study, we present a mean total annual precipitation mapping technique that combines topographical information (i.e. elevation and slope orientation) with average total annual rain gauge data in order to overcome this problem. A unique feature of this paper is the identification of the scale at which topography influences the precipitation pattern as well as the direction of the dominant weather circulation. This method was applied for Belgium and surroundings and shows that the identification of the appropriate scale at which topographical obstacles impact precipitation is crucial in order to obtain reliable mean total annual precipitation maps. The dominant weather circulation is determined at 260°. Hence, this approach allows accurate mapping of mean annual precipitation patterns in regions characterized by rather high topographical complexity using a climate data network with a relatively low density and/or when more advanced precipitation measurement techniques, such as radar, aren't available, for example in the case of historical data

Implementation of a double moment cloud microphysics scheme in the UK met office regional numerical weather prediction model

Cloud microphysics parametrizations control the transfer of water between phases and hydrometeor species in numerical weather prediction and climate models. As a fundamental component of weather modelling systems cloud microphysics can determine the intensity and timing of precipitation, the extent and longevity of cloud cover and its impact on radiative balance, and directly influence near surface weather metrics such as temperature and wind. In this paper we introduce and demonstrate the performance of a double moment cloud microphysical scheme (CASIM: Cloud AeroSol Interacting Microphysics) in both midlatitude and tropical settings using the same model configuration. Comparisons are made against a control configuration using the current operational single moment cloud microphysics, and CASIM configurations that use fixed in-cloud droplet number or compute cloud droplet number concentration from the aerosol environment. We demonstrate that configuring CASIM as a single moment scheme results in precipitation rate histograms that match the operational single moment microphysics. In the midlatitude setting, results indicate that CASIM performs as well as the single moment microphysics configuration, but improves certain aspects of the surface precipitation field such as greater extent of light (1 mm · hr⁻¹) rain around frontal precipitation features. In the tropical setting, CASIM outperforms the single moment cloud microphysics as evident from improved comparison with radar derived precipitation rates

The Met Office Unified Model Global Atmosphere 7.0/7.1 and JULES Global Land 7.0 configurations

We describe Global Atmosphere 7.0 and GlobalLand 7.0 (GA7.0/GL7.0), the latest science configurations of the Met Office Unified Model (UM) and the Joint UK Land Environment Simulator (JULES) land surface model developed for use across weather and climate timescales. GA7.0 and GL7.0 include incremental developments and targeted improvements that, between them, address four critical errors identified in previous configurations: excessive precipitation biases over India, warm and moist biases in the tropical tropopause layer (TTL), a source of energy non-conservation in the advection scheme and excessive surface radiation biases over the Southern Ocean. They also include two new parametrisations, namely the UK Chemistry and Aerosol(UKCA) GLOMAP-mode (Global Model of Aerosol Processes) aerosol scheme and the JULES multi-layer snow scheme, which improve the fidelity of the simulation and were required for inclusion in the Global Atmosphere/Global Land configurations ahead of the 6th Coupled Model Inter-comparison Project (CMIP6).In addition, we describe the GA7.1 branch configuration, which reduces an overly negative anthropogenic aerosol effective radiative forcing (ERF) in GA7.0 whilst maintaining the quality of simulations of the present-day climate. GA7.1/GL7.0 will form the physical atmosphere/land component in the HadGEM3–GC3.1 and UKESM1 climate model submissions to the CMIP6

Modeling the contribution of the brussels heat island to a long temperature time series

A mesoscale meteorological model containing a detailed land surface model is used to assess the contribution of urban heating to the temperature record of the national recording station of Belgium in Uccle, near Brussels. The Advanced Regional Prediction System (ARPS) was applied over a domain of 60 km X 60 km with a horizontal resolution of 1 km. Four meteorological episodes were selected, and, for each of these, the model was integrated using two different land cover situations. The first consisted of a detailed reconstruction of the early nineteenth-century setting of Brussels and its wide surroundings, while the second corresponded to the present-day land cover. Since the nineteenth century, when the recording station of Uccle was established, a major land cover change from an agricultural area to a built surface has taken place. The temperature difference between the simulations at the site of Uccle was assumed to represent the urban effect on the site since the beginning of recording. The urban heat island (UHI) of Brussels was found to have a significant impact on the temperature record in Uccle. The urban-rural temperature difference was found to build up during the evening, gradually decreasing during the night and becoming zero during the day. By analyzing the surface energy balance it was revealed that the UHI is mainly caused by a greater storage of energy in the urban fabric during the day and a release of this heat in the evening. The UHI had a significant average impact on the Uccle temperature record during two of the four selected weather situations. The effect amounted to 0.77 degrees C in a cloudy weather situation with westerly winds and to 1.13 degrees C in a clear and calm weather situation

The precipitation response to the desiccation of Lake Chad

Located in the semi-arid African Sahel, Lake Chad has shrunk from a surface area of 25000 km2 in 1960 to about 1350 km2 due to a series of droughts and anthropogenic influences. The disappearance of such a large open-water body can be expected to have a noticeable effect on the meteorology in the surroundings of the lake. The impact could extend even further to the west as westward propagating convective systems pass Lake Chad in the rainfall season. This study examines the sensitivity of the regional hydrology and convective processes to the desiccation of the lake using a regional atmospheric model. Three Lake Chad scenarios are applied reflecting the situation in 1960, the current situation and a potential future scenario in which the lake and the surrounding wetlands have disappeared. The model simulations span the months JulySeptember in 2006, which includes the rainfall season in the Lake Chad area. Total precipitation amounts and the components of the hydrological cycle are found to be hardly affected by the existence of the lake. A filled Lake Chad does, however, increase the precipitation at the east side of the lake. The model results indicate that the boundary layer moisture and temperature are significantly altered downwind of the lake. By investigating a mesoscale convective system (MCS) case, this is found to affect the development and progress of the system. At first, the MCS is intensified by the more unstable boundary layer air but the persistence of the system is altered as the cold pool propagation becomes less effective. The proposed mechanism is able to explain the differences in the rainfall patterns nearby Lake Chad between the scenarios. This highlights the local sensitivity to the desiccation of Lake Chad whereas the large-scale atmospheric processes are not affected. Copyright (c) 2011 Royal Meteorological Societ

Towards retrieving critical relative humidity from ground-based remote-sensing observations

Nearly all large-scale cloud parametrizations require the specification of the critical relative humidity (RHcrit). This is the grid-box mean relative humidity at which the subgrid fluctuations in temperature and water vapour are assumed to become so large that part of a subsaturated grid box becomes saturated and cloud starts to form. Until recently, the lack of high-resolution observations of temperature and moisture variability has hindered achievement of a reasonable estimate of RHcrit. However, the advent of ground-based Raman lidar now allows the acquisition of long records of temperature and moisture with subminute sample rates. Lidar observations are inherently noisy and any analysis of higher-order moments will be dependent on the ability to quantify and remove this noise. We present an exploratory study aimed at understanding whether current noise levels of lidar-retrieved temperature and water vapour are sufficiently low to obtain a reasonable estimate of RHcrit. We show that vertical profiles of RHcrit can be derived with an uncertainty of a few per cent. RHcrit tends to be smallest near the boundary-layer top and seems to be insensitive to the horizontal grid spacing at the scales investigated here (30-120 km). However, larger sensitivity was found to the vertical grid spacing. RHcrit is observed to decrease by 10% as the vertical grid spacing quadruples. By way of example, the lidar-retrieved RHcrit profiles were used to evaluate a parametrization that estimates RHcrit from variances diagnosed from the boundary-layer parametrization. It is shown that this parametrization overestimates RHcrit by up to 10%, but captures the diurnal variability of RHcrit well, with lower values of RHcrit near the boundary-layer top. While we show that the uncertainties associated with the retrievals are large, lidar observations seem promising to diagnose and evaluate a very important parameter to predict cloud fraction in climate and numerical weather prediction models

How well can a convection-permitting climate model reproduce decadal statistics of precipitation, temperature and cloud characteristics?

status: publishe

Towards a mini-ensemble of Regional Earth System Models for climate services over Belgium

editorial reviewe