News Release

Multi model forecast biases of the diurnal variations of intense rainfall in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region

Peer-Reviewed Publication

Science China Press

The subdaily variations of the weak synoptic forcing (WSF) rainfall events.

image: (a) mean precipitation, (b) mean precipitation intensity, and (c) mean precipitation frequency view more 

Credit: ©Science China Press

This study is led by Prof. Qi Zhong (China Meteorological Administration Training Center), Dr. Haoming Chen (Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences), and Meteorologist Zhuo Sun, Jiangbo Li, Lili Shen of Hebei Meteorological Observatory. In this study, intense rainfall events in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region (BTHR) were categorized into two types: those mainly due to strong synoptic forcings (SSF) and those with weak synoptic forcings (WSF). Then the fine biases and possible reasons of the forecasts of intense rainfall in the current operational numerical models are discovered.

The common biases showed that, the numerical forecasts tend to overestimate the frequency of intense rainfall events but underestimate the rainfall intensity. Of these, the overestimation of precipitation frequency mainly appeared in the mountainous areas in the afternoon.

Although the high-resolution mesoscale models showed a notable improvement in forecasting the afternoon intense rainfall compared with global models, they all have an obvious bias in forecasting the nighttime rainfall. For the WSF type, both global model and mesoscale model have a low forecast skill, with large biases in subdaily propagation feature. The possible causes are related to a poor performance of the model in reproducing the local thermodynamical circulations and the dynamical processes in the planetary boundary layer.

See the article:

Zhong Q, Sun Z, Chen H, Li J, Shen L. 2022. Multi model forecast biases of the diurnal variations of intense rainfall in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region. Science China Earth Sciences, 65(8): 1490–1509, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11430-021-9905-4


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