Regional-scale simulations of the western US climate

Over the past two decades the meteorological community has witnessed the evolution of general circulation models (GCMs) from studies attempting to simulate realistic large-scale dynamical regimes and energy transports to present investigations examining future climate change scenarios. From these pioneering studies, we were inspired to begin to develop regional climatologies with the Colorado State University Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (CSU-RAMS). Our major goal is to develop a better understanding of the hydrologic cycle in the mountainous, and west. An advantage of using the RAMS code is that we can generate detailed descriptions of precipitation processes, which will hopefully translate into realistic surface yields of both rain and snow. In the ensuing sections, we first describe the model and its microphysics parameterizations, then continue with our methodology for incorporating large-scale data into the model grid. Preliminary results demonstrating the mesoscale variation of precipitation over the mountainous western US are then presented