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Impact of refined land surface properties on the simulation of a heavy convective rainfall process in the Pearl River Delta region, China

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Abstract

The location and occurrence time of convective rainfalls have attracted great public concern as they can lead to terrible disasters. However, the simulation results of convective rainfalls in the Pearl River Delta region often show significant discrepancies from the observations. One of the major causes lies in the inaccurate geographic distribution of land surface properties used in the model simulation of the heavy precipitation. In this study, we replaced the default soil and vegetation datasets of Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model with two refined datasets, i.e. the GlobCover 2009 (GLC2009) land cover map and the Harmonized World Soil Database (HWSD) soil texture, to investigate the impact of vegetation and soil on the rainfall patterns. The result showed that the simulation patterns of convective rainfalls obtained from the coupled refined datasets are more consistent with the observations than those obtained from the default ones. By using the coupled refined land surface datasets, the overlap ratio of high precipitation districts reached 36.3% with a variance of 28.5 km from the observed maximum rainfall position, while those of the default United States Geological Survey (USGS) dataset and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) dataset are 17.0%/32.8 km and 24.9%/49.0 km, respectively. The simulated total rainfall amount and occurrence time using the coupled refined datasets are the closest to the observed peak values. In addition, the HWSD soil data has improved the accuracy of the simulated precipitation amount, and the GLC2009 land cover data also did better in catching the early peak time.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Environmental Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Xingang West Road 135, Guangzhou, China

    Ming Chang, Qi Fan, Weihua Chen, Yu Wang & Xuemei Wang

  2. Guangzhou Research Institute of Environmental Protection, Guangzhou, China

    Shaofen Fan

  3. Urban Environment and Ecology Research Center, South China Institute of Environmental Sciences (SCIES), Ministry of Environmental Protection, Guangzhou, China

    Yiqiang Zhang

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  1. Ming Chang
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  2. Shaofen Fan
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  3. Qi Fan
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  4. Weihua Chen
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  5. Yiqiang Zhang
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  6. Yu Wang
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  7. Xuemei Wang
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Correspondence to Qi Fan or Xuemei Wang.

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Chang, M., Fan, S., Fan, Q. et al. Impact of refined land surface properties on the simulation of a heavy convective rainfall process in the Pearl River Delta region, China. Asia-Pacific J Atmos Sci 50 (Suppl 1), 645–655 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13143-014-0052-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13143-014-0052-3

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