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Cold Season Performance of the NU-WRF Regional Climate Model in the Great Lakes Region



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  • Journal Title:
    Journal of Hydrometeorology
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  • Description:
    As Earth’s largest collection of fresh water, the Laurentian Great Lakes have enormous ecological and socio-economic value. Their basin has become a regional hotspot of climatic and limnological change, potentially threatening its vital natural resources. Consequentially, there is a need to assess the current state of climate models regarding their performance across the Great Lakes region and develop the next generation of high-resolution regional climate models to address complex limnological processes and lake-atmosphere interactions. In response to this need, the current paper focuses on the generation and analysis of a 20-member ensemble of 3-km National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)-Unified Weather Research and Forecasting (NU-WRF) simulations for the 2014-2015 cold season. The study aims to identify the model’s strengths and weaknesses; optimal configuration for the region; and the impacts of different physics parameterizations, coupling to a 1D lake model, time-variant lake-surface temperatures, and spectral nudging. Several key biases are identified in the cold-season simulations for the Great Lakes region, including an atmospheric cold bias that is amplified by coupling to a 1D lake model but diminished by applying the Community Atmosphere Model radiation scheme and Morrison microphysics scheme; an excess precipitation bias; anomalously early initiation of fall lake turnover and subsequent cold lake bias; excessive and overly persistent lake ice cover; and insufficient evaporation over Lakes Superior and Huron. The research team is currently addressing these key limitations by coupling NU-WRF to a 3D lake model in support of the next generation of regional climate models for the critical Great Lakes Basin.
  • Keywords:
  • Source:
    Journal of Hydrometeorology (2021)
  • DOI:
  • ISSN:
    1525-755X ; 1525-7541
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    Other
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    Library
  • Main Document Checksum:
    urn:sha-512:b1d8a697b9affc9bbe2e39e991ed7c6210e9d3915a6039c97015deae1226de0161b343db66a7987bce06007b101e376de3d80ef60d3b47032063a983af2d20ae
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