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Published November 16, 2013 | Supplemental Material + Published
Journal Article Open

Improved simulation of extreme precipitation in a high-resolution atmosphere model

Abstract

Climate models often underestimate the magnitude of extreme precipitation. We compare the performance of a high-resolution (∼0.25°) time-slice atmospheric simulation (1979–2005) of the Community Earth System Model 1.0 in representing daily extreme precipitation events against those of the same model at lower resolutions (∼1° and 2°). We find significant increases in the simulated levels of daily extreme precipitation over Europe, the United States, and Australia. In many cases the increase in high percentiles (>95th) of daily precipitation leads to better agreement with observational data sets. For lower percentiles, we find that increasing resolution does not significantly increase values of simulated precipitation. We argue that the reduced biases mainly result from the higher resolution models resolving more key physical processes controlling heavy precipitation. We conclude that while high resolution is vital for accurately simulating extreme precipitation, considerable biases remain at the highest available model resolutions.

Additional Information

© 2013 American Geophysical Union. Received 3 September 2013; revised 22 October 2013; accepted 23 October 2013; published 14 November 2013. We thank David Jones, Andrew King, and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology for providing the Australian Water Availability Project data. Computing resources for 1ı and 2ı simulations by the Computational and Information Systems Laboratory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). NCAR is sponsored by the National Science Foundation. Computing resources for 0.25ı were provided by the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is supported by the Office of Science of the Department of Energy. The Editor thanks two anonymous reviewers for their assistance in evaluating this paper.

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Published - grl51086.pdf

Supplemental Material - Supplementary.pdf

Supplemental Material - readme.txt

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