MESO, Inc.

Research To Improve Numerical Model Weather Forecasting

High Resolution Climate Project

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There are a multitude of applications which require values for statistical parameters which describe the local climate. The most obvious and direct way to obtain local climate statistics is to calculate them from long-term point observations. However, the use of long-term observational datasets imposes at least two limitations: (1) long-term point observations are not currently available for many required locations in the United States or have sites with a limited period of record; and (2) the representativeness and quality of observations change in time as observing sites are relocated, the land use around a site is changed, or new instrumentation is used.

MESO, Inc. created CLIMOD (CLImate statistics by a dynamical MODel) which is a system designed to use output from the MASS model to produce high resolution 3-D gridded climatologies for data sparse locations. Data sparse locations are areas with limited direct observation sites. MESO conducted research for the U.S. Air Force and successfully generated hourly 10 Km resolution climate data for several regions around the globe. The pilot study was done for the Eastern Great Lakes Region (Zack et al. 1996). Currently climatologies for Korea and the Middle East are being generated. An example of the quality of temperature climatologies for point locations is seen in the figure below. The daily temperature curve is represented remarkably well by the simulated temperatures. This high quality was obtained for most locations in the domain area.

A comparison of the 24-hour 10-year (1985-94) temperature climatology for Watertown, NY. The blue line represents the observed climatology; the red line represents the simulated climatology. The temperature is in degrees Fahrenheit, the Local Time is Eastern Standard Time.

The next figure is an example of a grid of January snowfall climatology. No surface or upper-air station observations were used in creating these climatologies. Observational data was used only to verify the quality of the climate statistics produced by the model.

Average January snowfall for the period 1985 to 1994 obtained from 310 days of simulations with a 10 Km resolution of the MASS model. The contour interval is 2 inches.

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REFERENCE
Zack, J.W., K.T. Waight, M.D. Bousquet, C. Graves, S. Yalda, G.E.Van Knowe, 1996: An Evaluation of Local CLimate Statistics Generated from the Output of a 3-D Mesoscale Atmospheric Model. Preprints to the Eleventh Conference on Numerical Weather Prediction (Norfolk,VA; August 19-23, 1996), American Meteorological Society, Boston, MA, 379-381.