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Evaluation of the WRF Model's Performance at Gray-Zone Resolution in Simulating Climate over the Tibetan Plateau
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DOI：10.1175/JCLI-D-25-0419.1.png)
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Abstract
En 中文
The Tibetan Plateau (TP), also known as the Water Tower of Asia, profoundly impacts regional and global climates. Existing climate models show substantial biases over the TP, primarily due to low spatial resolution, deficient driving data, and inadequate model domains. Leveraging meteorological station data, the CN05.1 meteorological dataset, and reanalysis data-sets, we comprehensively evaluate the performance of the Weather Research and Forecasting Model at gray-zone resolution (9 km) (WRF9km) in simulating TP air temperature and precipitation during 1980-2019 and identify bias causes. WRF9km effectively captures observed spatial air temperature patterns but shows a cold bias. This is mainly due to overestimated surface albedo (accounting for 64%), along with underestimated downward radiation and ground heat fluxes. WRF9km also simulates observed spatial precipitation patterns well, with significant seasonal correlations; however, precipitation biases exhibit pronounced spatial heterogeneity. Compared to CN05.1, precipitation is overestimated over the southern and eastern slopes of the TP, while it is underestimated over the interior TP, especially in the western part. These biases primarily arise from inadequate characterization of wind field dynamics and moisture transport within the model framework. Meanwhile, WRF9km captures annual precipitation variation with minor deviations, although it does not fully reproduce the temporal trends over the TP. Overall, compared to driving ERA5 data, WRF9km yields only marginal improvement for the cold bias but reduces the regional mean precipitation wet bias by 79%, particularly over the southern and eastern slopes. This evaluation provides critical insights for dynamic downscaling in complex terrain, highlighting the need for improved surface albedo parameterizations and higher-quality input data.
Keywords:
Tibetan Plateau
Dynamics
Climate
Precipitation
Temperature
Climate models
Journal
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4
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1.4W
Citations:
5.9W
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