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2024 EWRI Congress

2024 Symposium on Hydro-climate and Climate Change (Watershed)

Emerging Concepts and Methods in Modeling Hydrologic and Hydro-climatic Processes - II

473 - Depth-Area Analysis of Precipitation Outputs from the Numerical Atmospheric Model

Tuesday, May 21, 2024
3:30 PM – 3:45 PM CT
Room: S 103 B
In this study, the reconstructed precipitation data obtained by dynamical downscaling of global reanalysis data was used to construct Depth-Area (DA) curves at the Columbia River Basin. The Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model was used for the reconstruction of precipitation fields with 4 x 4 km2 spatial resolution and 1-hr temporal resolution. The DA curves from HMR57 and WRF simulations were compared for three storm events. While overall tendencies of DA curves from HMR 57 and WRF simulations were generally similar, detailed investigation on the shape of DA curves suggested that multiple peaks by localized extreme precipitation areas, which caused the non-smooth shapes in the WRF DA curves, were not seen in the original HMR 57 DA curves. It was also suggested that the tendency of positive bias in the reconstructed WRF precipitation might contribute to the higher depth of the WRF DA curve for the longer durations, though the differences between the WRF and the reference DA curve (USACE-NWP) were relatively small for 1996 storm event. It should be noted that spatially sparce observations in the earlier years (1964 and 1974) could cause uncertainties in the accuracy of the DA curves in the early years. Thus, the positive bias in WRF simulations and relative uncertainties of the original DA curve in the earlier years might be one of the reasons for the differences of DA curves between those of WRF and HMR 57 in the early years.