Evaluating 3 decades of precipitation in the Upper Colorado River basin from a high-resolution regional climate model

Rudisill, William; Flores, Alejandro; Carroll, Rosemary

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-16-6531-2023

Articles | Volume 16, issue 22

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-16-6531-2023

© Author(s) 2023. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-16-6531-2023

© Author(s) 2023. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 16, issue 22

Model evaluation paper

|

15 Nov 2023

Model evaluation paper |

| 15 Nov 2023

Evaluating 3 decades of precipitation in the Upper Colorado River basin from a high-resolution regional climate model

William Rudisill, Alejandro Flores, and Rosemary Carroll

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-16-6531-2023-supplement

Data sets

Dynamically Downscaled (WRF) 1km, Hourly Meteorological Conditions 1987-2020. East/Taylor Watersheds William Rudisill, Allison Vincent, Caroline Nash, and Alejandro Flores https://doi.org/10.15485/1845448

Gridded Ensemble Precipitation and Temperature Estimates over the Contiguous United States Version 2.0 Climate Data Gateway at NCAR https://doi.org/10.5065/D6TH8JR2

Livneh daily CONUS near-surface gridded meteorological and derived hydrometeorological data NOAA Physical Sciences Laboratory https://psl.noaa.gov/data/gridded/data.livneh.html

ASO L4 Lidar Snow Depth 50m UTM Grid, Version 1 T. Painter https://doi.org/10.5067/STOT5I0U1WVI

Model code and software

bsu-wrudisill/WRF-Run: first release pt 2 (v.0.1) Will Rudisill https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10058594

dataRetrieval: R packages for discovering and retrieving water data available from U.S. federal hydrologic web services, 2.7.13 Laura DeCicco, Robert Hirsch, David Lorenz, David Watkins, and Mike Johnson https://doi.org/10.5066/P9X4L3GE

bsu-wrudisill/NRCSSnotel-Downloader: 1st Release (v1.0.0) Will Rudisill https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8045105

Short summary

It is important to know how well atmospheric models do in mountains, but there are not very many weather stations. We evaluate rain and snow from a model from 1987–2020 in the Upper Colorado River basin against the available data. The model works rather well, but there are still some uncertainties in remote locations. We then use snow maps collected by aircraft, streamflow measurements, and some advanced statistics to help identify how well the model works in ways we could not do before.