Seasonal and diurnal performance of daily forecasts with WRF V3.8.1 over the United Arab Emirates

Branch, Oliver; Schwitalla, Thomas; Temimi, Marouane; Fonseca, Ricardo; Nelli, Narendra; Weston, Michael; Milovac, Josipa; Wulfmeyer, Volker

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-14-1615-2021

Articles | Volume 14, issue 3

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-14-1615-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-14-1615-2021

© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 14, issue 3

Model experiment description paper

|

19 Mar 2021

Model experiment description paper |

| 19 Mar 2021

Seasonal and diurnal performance of daily forecasts with WRF V3.8.1 over the United Arab Emirates

Oliver Branch, Thomas Schwitalla, Marouane Temimi, Ricardo Fonseca, Narendra Nelli, Michael Weston, Josipa Milovac, and Volker Wulfmeyer

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Final revised paper (published on 19 Mar 2021)
Preprint (discussion started on 01 Sep 2020)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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RC1: 'Review of GMD-2020-201', Anonymous Referee #1, 10 Nov 2020
- AC1: 'Reply to reviewer 1', Oliver Branch, 16 Nov 2020
RC2: 'Referee's comments', Anonymous Referee #2, 30 Nov 2020

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Oliver Branch on behalf of the Authors (29 Dec 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (23 Jan 2021) by Volker Grewe

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (07 Feb 2021)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

Summary: I am satisfied with the authors’ responses to my comments from the initial review. Overall, the revised manuscript is greatly improved, though there remains a smattering of mostly typo-level issues to fix, and one bigger discrepancy between Figure 6 and Table 5 that must be resolved. Upon correction of those issues, the manuscript should be ready for publication. I look forward to seeing it in print in final form, and I congratulate the authors on assembling this interesting paper.

Recommendation: Minor Revision.

Major Comments:
1. Lines 318–320 (the final sentence of the paragraph) and Table 5 agree with each other, but these do not agree with Figure 6. In Figure 6, the highest dewpoints in each season are observed at the marine stations, which makes physical sense. Correspondingly, in each season, the dewpoint depression (air temperature minus dewpoint temperature) is smallest (i.e., the relative humidity is highest) for the marine stations. This also makes physical sense. The dewpoint depressions that I can roughly calculate from Fig. 6 are substantially different from what is listed in Table 5. For example, for summer in Table 5, the mean dewpoint depression for UAE, Mountain, Marine, and Desert are 21.1°C, 17.3°C, 18.2°C, and 16.6°C, respectively. From eyeballing the mean values in Fig. 6, I calculate approximate values of 18.5°C, 20.0°C, 11.5°C, and 23.0°C, respectively. Those are pretty different from each other, and tell a different story! It appears that either Fig. 6 or Table 5 is in error as they report contradictory values, but Fig. 6 makes more physical sense to me than Table 5 or lines 318–320. Upon resolving this discrepancy, please revise the text in lines 318–320 accordingly.

Minor Comments and Typos:
1. There are still several instances of “WRF-NOAH-MP” leftover throughout the revised manuscript that were not cleaned up from the original manuscript (lines 15, 70, 78). Please change these to “WRF with Noah-MP” or something similar.
2. Change “NOAH-MP” to “Noah-MP” throughout the manuscript. This is how it is spelled and capitalized by the developers of the scheme, including in the title of Niu et al. (2011), the primary reference for Noah-MP LSM.
3. Line 17: Change “10m” to “10-m”.
4. Line 20: Add commas before and after “however”.
5. Line 21: I suggest (but do not insist on) changing “lowest” to “smallest.” Smallest bias describes magnitude, while lowest bias can imply position on the number line (either less positive or more negative), which is the opposite of what you intend.
6. Line 22: Add a comma after “overestimated”.
7. Lines 45, 48, 309, 410, 419: Add a comma after “e.g.”.
8. Line 49: Delete “in particular”.
9. Line 50: Change the dash (-) to an em dash (—).
10. Line 75: Change “16, 14, and 18 stations” to “17, 15, and 16 stations” to align with Sec. 2.5.1.4, Fig. 1a, and Table 3.
11. Line 79: Uncapitalize both “Materials” and “Methods”.
12. Line 80: Add a comma after “configuration”.
13. Line 100: Change “heat-low” to “low”. Heat lows (thermal lows) are a summertime phenomenon, and do not occur in January in the Northern Hemisphere mid-latitudes.
14. Line 102: Change “heat-low” to “heat low”, and delete “appear”.
15. Line 120: WRF was already defined and references provided for it back in Sec. 1, so doing so in both places is unnecessary.
16. Line 138: For completeness, define RRTMG.
17. Line 140: For completeness, define MYNN.
18. Lines 150 & 158: Change “resolution” to “grid spacing”.
19. Line 158 & Fig. 4 caption: Change “30 arc second” to “30-arcsecond”.
20. Line 169: Un-bold “Here, we used”. Also, there should only be one set of parentheses around the (Danielson and Gesch, 2011) reference.
21. Line 175: Change the period after “that time” to a semicolon.
22. Line 178: Change “in a NWP mode” to “in NWP mode”.
23. Line 188: Delete “e.g.,”.
24. Line 206: Change “2m” and “10m” to “2 m” and “10 m” (add spaces).
25. Lines 207 & 221: Correct the date formats to, for example, 30 November 2015. Most of the rest of the dates were changed to this format, but there were a couple stragglers that got missed.
26. Line 231: Change “3” to “three”.
27. Line 248: For MET, add a reference to Brown et al. (2021, https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-19-0093.1).
28. Lines 255–268: I suggest deleting the parenthetical statement on line 255 (and replacing it with a colon), and making the introduction of these three metrics a bulleted list.
29. Line 269: Add a comma after “day”.
30. Line 286: Change “(negative indicate La Niña events)” to “(negative ONI indicates La Niña events)”.
31. Line 292: Add a comma after “pressure”.
32. Line 294: Change “than apparent” to “than is apparent”.
33. Line 295: Change “don’t” to “do not”.
34. Lines 300 & 308: Delete “for instance”.
35. Line 330: The section heading should be on a separate line.
36. Lines 408–409: Change “This is because the method of calculation of transfer coefficients/fluxes are executed in NOAH-MP, the PBL scheme, and the surface layer scheme (SLS) depends on the land surface type.” to “This is because, depending on the land surface type, the calculations of transfer coefficients/fluxes are made in Noah-MP, the PBL scheme, or the surface layer scheme (SLS).”
37. Line 433: Change “For while” to “While”.
38. Line 434: Add a comma after “diurnal”, and after “differences”.
39. Line 435: Change “scientifically interesting, and importantly may reveal” to “scientifically interesting. Importantly, this assessment may reveal”. (The original sentence is a run-on sentence with far too many clauses connected by “and”.)
40. Line 449: Change “A caveat generally” to “A general caveat”.
41. Line 451: Change “on” to “in”.
42. Line 453: Add a comma after “moisture”.
43. Line 466: Delete the comma after “UAE”.
44. Fig. 1a: KSA is likely not a commonly known acronym. I suggest replacing it with Saudi Arabia.
45. Fig. 1 caption: Change “200 m a.s.l.” to “200 m ASL”.
46. Fig. 2 caption: Change “FIgure” to “Figure”, and superscript the -1 in “m s-1”.
47. Fig. 4 caption: Change “~1 km” to “~1-km”, “21 class” to “21-class”, and “2 local datasets” to “two local datasets”.
48. Fig. 5 caption: Change “observation vs forecast” to “forecast vs. observation”.
49. Fig. 6: In addition to resolving the discrepancy in Major Point 1, I have the following suggestions for improving the readability of Figure 6:
a. Have grid lines at consistent intervals. The intermittent and inconsistent grid lines on all three panels currently make it hard to read. I suggest major grid lines (solid light gray, perhaps) every 5°C and every 1 m/s, and minor grid lines (dashed light gray, perhaps) every 1°C and every 0.2 m/s.
b. The major tick marks need to be clearly labeled, and these tick marks for panels a and b should be multiples of 5 (e.g., 0, 5, 10, 15, etc.), rather than 2, 7, 12, 17, etc. In Fig. 6b right now, it does not appear the tick mark labels are aligned with the major tick marks, either, which also makes it quite difficult to read the figure accurately or confidently.
50. Table 5: It is not clear to me what “time steps for each period” is. Also, why does it vary so much in autumn between the different regions?

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (08 Feb 2021) by Volker Grewe

AR by Oliver Branch on behalf of the Authors (10 Feb 2021) Author's response Author's tracked changes Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (11 Feb 2021) by Volker Grewe

AR by Oliver Branch on behalf of the Authors (11 Feb 2021) Manuscript

Short summary

Effective numerical weather forecasting is vital in arid regions like the United Arab Emirates where extreme events like heat waves, flash floods, and dust storms are becoming more severe. This study employs a high-resolution simulation with the WRF-NOAHMP model, and the output is compared with seasonal observation data from 50 weather stations. This type of verification is vital to identify model deficiencies and improve forecasting systems for arid regions.