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Evaluation of the WRF-Lake Model over Two Major Freshwater Lakes in China

  • Special Collection on Weather and Climate under Complex Terrain and Variable Land Surfaces: Observations and Numerical Simulations
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Abstract

This paper evaluates the performance of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model coupled with a lake scheme over the Lake Poyang and Lake Dongting regions. We choose several cases with different weather characteristics, including winter with/without precipitation and summer with/without precipitation, and conduct a series of experiments (without the lake model, with the default lake model, and with a calibrated lake model that adjusts the water absorption, extinction coefficients, and surface roughness length) for each case. The results show that the performance of the lake model is significantly affected by the weather conditions. For the winter with precipitation cases, the performance of the default lake model is even worse than without the lake model, but the calibrated lake model can obviously reduce the biases of 2-m temperature and dew-point temperature. Although the performance of the default and new calibrated models is intricate for other cases, the new calibrated model has prominent advantages for 2-m dew-point temperature. Moreover, a long-term simulation of five months also shows that the new calibrated coupled lake model performs better than the default one. These imply that the new calibrated coupled lake model is more suitable to be used in studies of the effects of Lake Poyang and Lake Dongting on regional weather and climate.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the ECMWF for providing the 6-hourly ERA-Interim dataset (https://rda.ucar.edu/datasets/ds627.0/) as the initial and boundary conditions to drive the WRF model. Besides, we also thank the National Meteorological Information Center of China (http://data.cma.cn) for providing the precipitation, relative humidity, temperature, and dew-point temperature observations data.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory for Semi-Arid Climate Change of the Ministry of Education, College of Atmospheric Sciences, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, 730000, China

    Yuanyuan Ma, Yi Yang, Chongjian Qiu & Chenghai Wang

  2. Key Laboratory of Land Surface Process and Climate Change in Cold and Arid Regions, Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Lanzhou, 730000, China

    Yuanyuan Ma

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  1. Yuanyuan Ma
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Correspondence to Yi Yang.

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Supported by the National Nature Science Foundation of China (41330527 and 41675098).

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Ma, Y., Yang, Y., Qiu, C. et al. Evaluation of the WRF-Lake Model over Two Major Freshwater Lakes in China. J Meteorol Res 33, 219–235 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13351-019-8070-9

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