Sensitivity of precipitation and temperature over the Mount Kenya area to physics parameterization options in a high-resolution model simulation performed with WRFV3.8.1

Messmer, Martina; González-Rojí, Santos J.; Raible, Christoph C.; Stocker, Thomas F.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-14-2691-2021

Articles | Volume 14, issue 5

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-14-2691-2021

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

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-14-2691-2021

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

Articles | Volume 14, issue 5

Model evaluation paper

|

18 May 2021

Model evaluation paper |

| 18 May 2021

Sensitivity of precipitation and temperature over the Mount Kenya area to physics parameterization options in a high-resolution model simulation performed with WRFV3.8.1

Martina Messmer, Santos J. González-Rojí, Christoph C. Raible, and Thomas F. Stocker

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Final revised paper (published on 18 May 2021)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 12 Nov 2020)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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- Supplement

SC1: 'executive editor comment on gmd-2020-347', Astrid Kerkweg, 14 Nov 2020
- AC1: 'Reply to 'executive editor comment on gmd-2020-347'', Martina Messmer, 17 Nov 2020
RC1: 'review of gmd-2020-347', Anonymous Referee #1, 11 Dec 2020
- AC2: 'Reply on RC1', Martina Messmer, 13 Jan 2021
RC2: 'Review of Messmer et al.', Anonymous Referee #2, 21 Dec 2020
- AC3: 'Reply on RC2', Martina Messmer, 13 Jan 2021

Peer-review completion

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

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

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (23 Feb 2021) by Fabien Maussion

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (07 Mar 2021)

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (15 Mar 2021)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

I would like to thank the authors for their careful and detailed responses to all of the reviewer comments, as well as for performing numerous additional sensitivity simulations to evaluate the robustness of the presented results and conclusions. The authors’ revisions and clarifications have greatly improved the manuscript and the revised figures provide the relevant information in a succinct and compact way. I support its publication in GMD subject to the consideration of the small comments below in the final version.

1. I was curious what the difference between the ‘South America’ and ‘Cumulus3’ configurations for the 5km_D02 simulations was, because they appear identical from Table 1. A diff of the provided namelists indicates that they differ in the deep convection parameterization, which was turned on for the 5-km domain in the ‘South America’ configuration. I suggest that the authors check that the sample namelist is correct or amend the description of which domains employed a cumulus parameterization at line 153 in the revised manuscript/Table 1.

2. Figure R2.1 The results of the version testing are interesting and, in my opinion, relevant for readers interested in using the presented work to inform their own simulations. I suggest adding one sentence to the methods indicating that, compiler differences aside, using the more recent version of WRF essentially degrades the performance.

3. Figure S1 & Line 410: “Nevertheless, it must be noted that peak precipitation rates on a sub-daily basis are captured much more realistic with respect to IMERG, compared to the other parameterizations options, but only in domains where the others use a cumulus parameterization (see supplementary Fig. S1).”
It is not clear to me why the authors have included the right column (9-km/D2 in 27km_D4 set up) since the stated goal is to evaluate the impact of different configurations on the kilometer-scale solution. In addition, I don’t see the result that the mean diurnal cycle is “much more realistic” in ‘No Cumulus.’ Although the timing of the afternoon peak is later (sometimes too late), the magnitude is very poorly captured. Can the authors clarify further the added value of showing and emphasizing these data?

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ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (18 Mar 2021) by Fabien Maussion

AR by Martina Messmer on behalf of the Authors (01 Apr 2021) Author's response Manuscript

Short summary

Sensitivity experiments with the WRF model are run to find an optimal parameterization setup for precipitation around Mount Kenya at a scale that resolves convection (1 km). Precipitation is compared against many weather stations and gridded observational data sets. Both the temporal correlation of precipitation sums and pattern correlations show that fewer nests lead to a more constrained simulation with higher correlation. The Grell–Freitas cumulus scheme obtains the most accurate results.