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Title: Metrics for the Diurnal Cycle of Precipitation: Toward Routine Benchmarks for Climate Models

Journal Article · · Journal of Climate
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  1. Lawrence Livermore National Lab. (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)
  2. SUNY Univ. at Albany, NY (United States)
  3. National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO (United States)
  4. Columbia Univ., New York, NY (United States)
+ Show Author Affiliations

In this paper, metrics are proposed—that is, a few summary statistics that condense large amounts of data from observations or model simulations—encapsulating the diurnal cycle of precipitation. Vector area averaging of Fourier amplitude and phase produces useful information in a reasonably small number of harmonic dial plots, a procedure familiar from atmospheric tide research. The metrics cover most of the globe but down-weight high-latitude wintertime ocean areas where baroclinic waves are most prominent. This enables intercomparison of a large number of climate models with observations and with each other. The diurnal cycle of precipitation has features not encountered in typical climate model intercomparisons, notably the absence of meaningful “average model” results that can be displayed in a single two-dimensional map. Displaying one map per model guides development of the metrics proposed here by making it clear that land and ocean areas must be averaged separately, but interpreting maps from all models becomes problematic as the size of a multimodel ensemble increases. Global diurnal metrics provide quick comparisons with observations and among models, using the most recent version of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP). This includes, for the first time in CMIP, spatial resolutions comparable to global satellite observations. Finally, consistent with earlier studies of resolution versus parameterization of the diurnal cycle, the longstanding tendency of models to produce rainfall too early in the day persists in the high-resolution simulations, as expected if the error is due to subgrid-scale physics.

Research Organization:
SUNY Univ. at Albany, NY (United States); National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Boulder, CO (United States); Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC), Biological and Environmental Research (BER); National Science Foundation (NSF); National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) (United States)
Grant/Contract Number:
AC52-07NA27344; SC0012602; SC0012711; AGS-1353740; AGS-1331375; NA15OAR4310086
OSTI ID:
1375303
Report Number(s):
LLNL-JRNL-677331
Journal Information:
Journal of Climate, Vol. 29, Issue 12; ISSN 0894-8755
Publisher:
American Meteorological SocietyCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 68 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

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Cited By (7)

The diurnal cycle of precipitation over South America represented by five gridded datasets journal August 2019
Rainfall trends in the African Sahel: Characteristics, processes, and causes journal June 2019
The diurnal cycle of East Asian summer monsoon precipitation simulated by the Met Office Unified Model at convection-permitting scales journal July 2018
Validating the Integrated Multisatellite Retrievals for Global Precipitation Measurement in Terms of Diurnal Variability With Hourly Gauge Observations Collected at 50,000 Stations in China journal September 2018
Robust Nocturnal and Early Morning Summer Rainfall Peaks over Continental East Asia in a Global Multiscale Modeling Framework journal January 2019
The Summertime Diurnal Cycle of Precipitation Derived from IMERG journal July 2019
Towards improved and more routine Earth system model evaluation in CMIP journal January 2016

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Related Subjects

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
58 GEOSCIENCES
diurnal effects
precipitation
models and modeling
climate models