U.S. flag An official website of the United States government.
Official websites use .gov

A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS

A lock ( ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

i

Update of upper level turbulence forecast by reducing unphysical components of topography in the numerical weather prediction model



Details

  • Journal Title:
    Geophysical Research Letters
  • Personal Author:
  • NOAA Program & Office:
    NWS (National Weather Service)
  • Description:
    On 2 November 2015, unrealistically large areas of light-or-stronger turbulence were predicted by the WRF-RAP (Weather Research and Forecast Rapid Refresh)-based operational turbulence forecast system over the western U.S. mountainous regions, which were not supported by available observations. These areas are reduced by applying additional terrain averaging, which damps out the unphysical components of small-scale (similar to 2x) energy aloft induced by unfiltered topography in the initialization of the WRF model. First, a control simulation with the same design of the WRF-RAP model shows that the large-scale atmospheric conditions are well simulated but predict strong turbulence over the western mountainous region. Four experiments with different levels of additional terrain smoothing are applied in the initialization of the model integrations, which significantly reduce spurious mountain-wave-like features, leading to better turbulence forecasts more consistent with the observed data.
  • Source:
    Geophysical Research Letters, 43(14), 7718-7724.
  • DOI:
  • Document Type:
    Journal Article
  • Rights Information:
    CC BY-NC-ND
  • Compliance:
    Library
  • Main Document Checksum:
    urn:sha256:a672fa7fda1df5a4442e74351e9b30e9253aac35d9ce8687d20b92a32e71f9cf
  • Download URL:
  • File Type:
    Filetype[PDF - 5.79 MB ]
PREVIOUS
ON THIS PAGE
Details
The NOAA IR serves as an archival repository of NOAA-published products including scientific findings, journal articles, guidelines, recommendations, or other information authored or co-authored by NOAA or funded partners. As a repository, the NOAA IR retains documents in their original published format to ensure public access to scientific information.
BACK TO TOP