Final Report: Informing Hydrologic Planning in the Red River Valley through Improved Regional Climate Projections
Dates
Publication Date
2018
Citation
Ming Xue, 2018, Final Report: Informing Hydrologic Planning in the Red River Valley through Improved Regional Climate Projections: .
Summary
The U.S. Great Plains is known for frequent hazardous convective weather and climate extremes. Across this region, climate change is expected to cause more severe droughts, more intense heavy rainfall events, and subsequently more flooding episodes. These potential changes in climate will adversely affect habitats, ecosystems, and landscapes as well as the fish and wildlife they support. Better understanding and simulation of regional precipitation can help natural resource managers mitigate and adapt to these adverse impacts. In this project, we aim to achieve a better precipitation downscaling in the Great Plains with the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model and use the high quality dynamic downscaling results (with a 4km horizontal [...]
Summary
The U.S. Great Plains is known for frequent hazardous convective weather and climate extremes. Across this region, climate change is expected to cause more severe droughts, more intense heavy rainfall events, and subsequently more flooding episodes. These potential changes in climate will adversely affect habitats, ecosystems, and landscapes as well as the fish and wildlife they support. Better understanding and simulation of regional precipitation can help natural resource managers mitigate and adapt to these adverse impacts. In this project, we aim to achieve a better precipitation downscaling in the Great Plains with the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model and use the high quality dynamic downscaling results (with a 4km horizontal resolution) to investigate the precipitation variability near the Edwards Plateau and Balcones Escarpment in Texas, an area prone to heavy rain and devastating flood events. To this end, WRF simulations with different physics schemes and nudging strategies are first conducted for a representative warm season. Results show that simply choosing different physics schemes is not enough to alleviate the dry bias over the southern Great Plains, which is related to an anticyclonic circulation anomaly over the central and western parts of continental Page 2 of 54 U.S. in the simulations. Spectral nudging emerges as an effective solution for alleviating the precipitation bias. As a result, a better precipitation downscaling is achieved. With the carefully designed configurations, WRF downscaling is conducted for 1980-2015. The downscaling captures well the spatial distribution of monthly climatology precipitation and the monthly/yearly variability, showing improvement over at least two previously published precipitation downscaling studies. With the improved precipitation downscaling, a better hydrological simulation over the trans-state Oologah watershed is also achieved. In addition, analyzing the high-resolution (4 km) downscaling outputs leads to a better understanding regarding the precipitation variability in Texas.
