Original paper
Lagrangian evaluation of convective shower characteristics in a convection-permitting model
Brisson, Erwan; Brendel, Christoph; Herzog, Stephan; Ahrens, Bodo
Meteorologische Zeitschrift Vol. 27 No. 1 (2018), p. 59 - 66
29 references
published: Jan 29, 2018
published online: Dec 19, 2017
manuscript accepted: Mar 15, 2017
final revised version received: Jan 30, 2017
manuscript revision requested: Nov 17, 2016
manuscript received: Jul 27, 2016
Open Access (paper may be downloaded free of charge)
Abstract
Convection-permitting models (CPMs) have proven their usefulness in representing precipitation on a sub-daily scale. However, investigations on sub-hourly scales are still lacking, even though these are the scales for which showers exhibit the most variability. A Lagrangian approach is implemented here to evaluate the representation of showers in a CPM, using the limited-area climate model COSMO-CLM. This approach consists of tracking 5‑min precipitation fields to retrieve different features of showers (e.g., temporal pattern, horizontal speed, lifetime). In total, 312 cases are simulated at a resolution of 0.01 ° over Central Germany, and among these cases, 78 are evaluated against a radar dataset. The model is able to represent most observed features for different types of convective cells. In addition, the CPM reproduced well the observed relationship between the precipitation characteristics and temperature indicating that the COSMO-CLM model is sophisticated enough to represent the climatological features of showers.
Keywords
Convection • Precipitation • Sub-hourly scale • COSMO-CLM