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A regional modeling study of the diurnal cycle in the lower troposphere in the south-eastern tropical Pacific

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Abstract

We examine the influence of the South-American land-mass and its mountains on the significant cyclic diurnal and semidiurnal components of the average circulation in the adjacent area of the southeastern tropical Pacific (SEP). Our approach is based on a number of numerical simulations with the regional atmospheric model weather research and forecasting forced by the National Centers for Environmental Prediction’s final analysis operational analysis data. In the control simulation the model domain covers the SEP and a large part of South America. In several sensitivity experiments the domain is reduced to progressively exclude continental areas. We find that the mean diurnal cycle is sensitive to model domain in ways that reveal the existence of different contributions originating from the Chilean and Peruvian land-masses. The experiments suggest that diurnal variations in circulations and thermal structures over the SEP (mainly forced by local insolation) are influenced by convection over the Peruvian sector of the Andes cordillera, while the mostly dry mountain-breeze circulations force an additional component that results in semi-diurnal variations near the coast. A series of numerical tests, however, reveal sensitivity of the simulations to the choice of vertical grid, limiting the possibility of solid quantitative statements on the amplitudes and phases of the diurnal and semidiurnal components across the domain.

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Acknowledgments

Support for this study was provided by the NSF grant AGS-0747533 and U.S. DOE funding DE-SC0001467, and the UK NERC grant NE/F020465/1. The data were provided by the Research Data Archive (RDA), which is maintained by the Computational and Information Systems Laboratory (CISL) at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). NCAR is sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The original data are available from the RDA (http://dss.ucar.edu) in dataset number ds083.2. The WRF model was developed at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), which also provides training and support. WRF simulations in this research were supported in part by the National Science Foundation through TeraGrid resources provided by Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, and by the Department of Meteorology at the University of Reading. ECMWF ERA-Interim data used in this study/project have been obtained from the ECMWF data server.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Meteorology, University of Reading, PO Box 243, Reading, Berkshire, RG6 6BB, UK

    Thomas Toniazzo

  2. University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Fengpeng Sun, Carlos R. Mechoso & Alex Hall

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  1. Thomas Toniazzo
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  2. Fengpeng Sun
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  3. Carlos R. Mechoso
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Correspondence to Thomas Toniazzo.

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Toniazzo, T., Sun, F., Mechoso, C.R. et al. A regional modeling study of the diurnal cycle in the lower troposphere in the south-eastern tropical Pacific. Clim Dyn 41, 1899–1922 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-012-1598-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-012-1598-3

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