Numerical study of the microphysics of a mesoscale convective system leads to flash flood events in the west and southwest of Iran

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 M.Sc. Graduate of Meteorology/ Institute of Geophysics, University of Tehran

2 Faculty member /Department of Space Physics, Institute of Geophysics, University of Tehran

3 Associate Professor/ Institute of Geophysics, University of Tehran

Abstract

This study investigated the performance of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) mesoscale model in the simulation of microphysical parameters of a mesoscale convective system (MCS) event. This case study occurred during 13 April 2016 over the west and southwest of Iran and resulted in a flood in these areas. For all simulations, the WRF model uses a one-way nesting for three meshes of 36, 12, and 4 km horizontal resolution, respectively. In all simulations, the data from NCEP global final analysis (FNL) on 1-degree by 1-degree grids provide initial and boundary conditions. The results obtained from the model simulations are compared with the observations. The distribution of daily precipitation from the second domain of the model outputs showed the Morrison scheme has better performance in the simulation of maximum rainfall and spatial distribution of daily rainfall than the Thompson scheme.
Comparison between the simulated daily precipitation in the third domain of all simulations and the observed daily precipitation at 40 synoptic stations in the study area shows that two schemes predict about half of the amount of rainfall in the region close to observational amounts for the mentioned day. Following, the time series of simulated values and station observations plotted for a variety of surface variables such as 2-meter temperature, relative humidity, and sea surface pressure for 13 April 2016 at Ahwaz station; it is possible to verify the model simulations for each of these parameters.
The last section investigated several microphysical parameters from the two simulations to better understand the MCS properties. In examining the vertical profile of these microphysical variables, no noticeable difference was observed from the simulation compared with the two schemes. Almost similar concentrations and fall velocities show that the precipitation results from the simulations are comparable and slightly different.

Keywords

References

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