Performance of MPAS-A and WRF in predicting and simulating western North Pacific tropical cyclone tracks and intensities
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Performance of MPAS-A and WRF in predicting and simulating western North Pacific tropical cyclone tracks and intensities Yuk Sing Lui 1
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Louis Kwan Shu Tse 1
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Chi-Yung Tam 2
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King Heng Lau 2 & Jilong Chen 2
Received: 27 October 2019 / Accepted: 18 October 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Performances of the Model for Prediction Across Scales-Atmosphere (MPAS-A) in predicting and the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model in simulating western North Pacific (WNP) tropical cyclone (TC) tracks and intensities have been compared. Parallel simulations of the same historical storms that made landfall over southern China, namely, TCs Hope (1979), Gordon (1989), Koryn (1993), Imbudo (2003), Dujuan (2003), Molave (2009), Hato (2017) and Mangkhut (2018), were carried out using WRF and MPAS-A, with initial conditions (and, for WRF, lateral boundary conditions as well) taken from ERAinterim. For MPAS-A, the model was integrated using a standard 60-to-3-km variable-resolution global grid mesh and also on 160-to-2-km grids customized to cover the TC tracks with the highest resolution mesh. The WRF model was integrated using a 15-km/3-km nested domain. No TC bogus scheme was applied when initializing the MPAS-A and WRF simulations. It was found that while TC tracks were reasonably captured by the two models configured variously, the storm intensities were underestimated in general. Given MPAS-A runs were initial value predictions whereas WRF runs were dynamically downscaled from ERA-interim, the finding that MPAS-A has comparable (or slightly better) performance as (than) WRF is noteworthy. To further examine the sensitivity of the MPAS-A TC forecasts to the initial data, additional experiments were carried out for TCs Molave and Hope using ERA5 reanalysis as initial conditions. The ERA5 initialized runs showed significant (slight) improvement in intensity (track) evolution, suggesting that the underestimated TC intensity is likely related to inferior representation of storms in the ERA-interim initial fields. Furthermore, additional runs using another customized 60-to-2-km mesh showed a reasonable improvement in capturing the TC tracks, suggesting that the track forecast accuracy of MPAS-A in TC can be sensitive to the grid resolution in the coarsest part of the variable-resolution mesh used.
1 Introduction During the TC peak season, western North Pacific (WNP) tropical cyclones (TCs) bring strong winds, extreme precipitation and high storm surges to the coastal cities in southern China (Chen et al. 2020), posing great threats to public safety Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-02003444-5. * Chi-Yung Tam [email protected] 1
ClusterTech Limited, Units 210-213, Lakeside 1, No.8 Science Park West Avenue, Hong Kong Science Park, Hong Kong, New Territories, China
2
Earth System Science Programme, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 3/F, Mong Man Wai Building, Shatin, Hong Kong, New Territories, China
an
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