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Multi model forecast biases of the diurnal variations of intense rainfall in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region

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Abstract

Forecasts of the intense rainfall events are important for the disaster prevention and reduction in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region (BTHR). What are the common biases in the forecasts of intense rainfall in the current operational numerical models? What are the possible causes of model bias? In this study, intense rainfall events in the BTHR were categorized into two types: those mainly due to strong synoptic forcings (SSF) and those with weak synoptic forcings (WSF). The results showed that, the numerical forecasts tend to overestimate the frequency of intense rainfall events but underestimate the rainfall intensity. Of these, the overestimation of precipitation frequency mainly appeared in the mountainous areas in the afternoon. Compared with global models, high-resolution mesoscale models showed a notable improvement in forecasting the afternoon intense rainfall, while they all have an obvious bias in forecasting the nighttime rainfall. For the WSF type, both global model and mesoscale model have a low forecast skill, with large biases in subdaily propagation feature. The possible causes are related to a poor performance of the model in reproducing the local thermodynamical circulations and the dynamical processes in the planetary boundary layer. So, the biases in forecasting the WSF type intense rainfall showed notable features of nonlinearity, which made it really challenging to understand their physical processes and to improve the associated forecasts.

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Acknowledgements

The authors sincerely thank Researcher Jisong SUN, Professor Xiaoding YU and Senior engineer Xiuming WANG from the China Meteorological Administration for their constructive suggestions for the analysis of Section 4. We also thank the reviewers for their insightful comments. This research was supported by the National Key R&D Project (Grant No. 2018YFC1507606) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 41505079, 42075154, 41475051 and 42030611).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. China Meteorological Administration Training Center, Beijing, 100081, China

    Qi Zhong

  2. Hebei Meteorological Observatory, Shijiazhuang, 050020, China

    Zhuo Sun, Jiangbo Li & Lili Shen

  3. Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences, Beijing, 100081, China

    Haoming Chen

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  1. Qi Zhong
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  2. Zhuo Sun
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  3. Haoming Chen
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  4. Jiangbo Li
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  5. Lili Shen
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Correspondence to Qi Zhong.

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Zhong, Q., Sun, Z., Chen, H. et al. Multi model forecast biases of the diurnal variations of intense rainfall in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region. Sci. China Earth Sci. 65, 1490–1509 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11430-021-9905-4

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