Journal article

The diurnal cycle of rainfall over New Guinea in convection-permitting WRF simulations

MEE Hassim, TP Lane, WW Grabowski

Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics | COPERNICUS GESELLSCHAFT MBH | Published : 2016

Open access

Abstract

In this study, we examine the diurnal cycle of rainfall over New Guinea using a series of convection-permitting numerical simulations with the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. We focus our simulations on a period of suppressed regional-scale conditions (February 2010) during which local diurnal forcings are maximised. Additionally, we focus our study on the occurrence and dynamics of offshore-propagating convective systems that contribute to the observed early-morning rainfall maximum north-east of New Guinea. In general, modelled diurnal precipitation shows good agreement with satellite-observed rainfall, albeit with some timing and intensity differences. The simulations also r..

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University of Melbourne Researchers

Grants

Awarded by ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science


Funding Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge David Lee (formerly of the University of Melbourne, now at Los Alamos National Laboratory) for providing Fig. 3. The authors would also like to thank Tim Dunkerton (editor), Stefan Tulich, Mitchell Moncrieff, and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments which improved the quality of the manuscript. This research was supported by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science (CE1100010128). High-performance computing was provided by the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) facility. Data analysis and visualisation were conducted with the NCAR Command Language (Version 6.2.1), Software, Boulder, Colorado: UCAR/NCAR/CISL/VETS, doi: 10.5065/D6WD3XH5, 2014.