Regional-scale simulations of the western United States climate
- Los Alamos National Lab., NM (United States)
- Scripps Institution of Oceanography, La Jolla, CA (United States)
Mesoscale models can provide a sufficiently detailed regional climatology. From these pioneering studies, we were inspired to begin to develop regional climatologies with the Colorado State University Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (CSU-RAMS). Our major goal is to develop a better understanding of the hydrologic cycle in the mountainous, arid west. An advantage of using the RAMS code is that we can generate detailed descriptions of precipitation processes, which will hopefully translate into realistic surface yields of both rain and snow. In the ensuing sections, we first describe the model and its microphysics parameterizations, then continue with our methodology for incorporating large-scale data into the model grid. Preliminary results demonstrating the mesoscale variation of precipitation over the mountainous western US are then presented. The model framework for the present study incorporates a three-dimensional, terrain-following non-hydrostatic version of the code. The simulation includes topography derived from a 5-minute global data set with a silhouette averaging scheme that preserves realistic topography heights. This height data is then interpolated to the model grid. 13 refs., 8 figs.
- Research Organization:
- Los Alamos National Lab., NM (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE; USDOE, Washington, DC (United States)
- DOE Contract Number:
- W-7405-ENG-36
- OSTI ID:
- 5009078
- Report Number(s):
- LA-UR-91-3082; CONF-920134-1; ON: DE92000182
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: 72. American Meteorological Society conference, Atlanta, GA (United States), 5-10 Jan 1992
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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Related Subjects
99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS//MATHEMATICS, COMPUTING, AND INFORMATION SCIENCE
CLIMATES
COMPUTERIZED SIMULATION
GENERAL CIRCULATION MODELS
REGIONAL ANALYSIS
METEOROLOGY
TOPOGRAPHY
ATMOSPHERIC CIRCULATION
ATMOSPHERIC PRECIPITATIONS
R CODES
RAIN
SNOW
COMPUTER CODES
MATHEMATICAL MODELS
SIMULATION
580000* - Geosciences
990200 - Mathematics & Computers