Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences

Performance of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model for Month-long pan-Arctic Simulations

Cassano, J. J., M. E. Higgins, and M. W. Seefeldt

2011, Monthly Weather Review, 139, 3469,3488, doi: 10.1175/MWR-D-10-05065.1.

The performance of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model was evaluated for month-long simulations over a large pan-Arctic model domain. The evaluation of seven different WRF (version 3.1.0) configurations for four months (January, April, July, and October 2007) indicated that WRF produces reasonable simulations of the Arctic atmosphere. For all WRF configurations considered large errors in circulation are evident in the North Pacific. The errors in the North Pacific are due to an overly weak and westward shifted Aleutian Low and overly strong sub-tropical Pacific high simulated by WRF. These circulation errors are nearly barotropic and vary slightly in magnitude and position as the WRF physics options and domain size are varied. The use of spectral nudging of wave numbers 1 through 3 significantly reduces the circulation bias in WRF as does the use of WRF version 3.2.0.