High-resolution simulations of tropical island thunderstorms: Does an increase in resolution improve the representation of extreme rainfall?

Abstract

Recent increases in computational resources have led to the application of kilometre- and sub-kilometre-scale simulations in research, numerical weather prediction, and climate modelling alike. Despite anticipated improvements with resolution, there is still considerable work needed to evaluate how well such models improve the representation of intense convection. In this study we conduct ensemble simulations with kilometre- and sub-kilometre-scale horizontal grids to investigate intense convective events in the tropical island thunderstorm system Hector, which frequently occurs over the Tiwi Islands in North Australia. To avoid losing information through spatio-temporal averaging we apply a..