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2024 EWRI Congress

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

Modeling Hydrologic Processes at the Catchment Scale in the Context of Changing Climate - II

471 - Configuration and Validation of the WRF Model for the Columbia River Basin

Monday, May 20, 2024
4:45 PM – 5:00 PM CT
Room: S 101 D
This study configured and validated the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model for the Columbia River Basin (CRB). The performance of WRF model was evaluated by examining spatial and temporal WRF results against PRISM dataset. The dynamical downscaling over the CRB was performed with 36-, 12-, and 4-km resolutions. Firstly, the sensitivity of the WRF model against changes in physics options was examined. Secondly, the physics options of the WRF model were configured for the November 1996 storm event. Then, the configured WRF model was validated for 10 storm events, which consisted of five storm events in winter and five in spring. During the validation, the performance of the WRF model was investigated for each of the sub-basins in the CRB. In configuring and validating the WRF model, Climate Forecast System Reanalysis (CFSR) was mainly used while NOAA-CIRES 20th Century Reanalysis V2c (20CRV2c) was also used to see the impact of global reanalysis data on the WRF simulations. The validation indicated that the configured WRF model showed reasonable performance in simulating both winter and spring season storm events, while CFSR outperformed 20CRV2c. The long-term reconstruction of the CRB atmospheric fields for the 90-year period from 1928 to 2017 suggested less agreements between PRISM and the simulated precipitation and temperature in the earlier period.