Evaluation of regional climate simulations of the 1998 and 1999 East Asian summer monsoon using the GAME/HUBEX observational data

A regional climate model based on the Penn State/NCAR Mesoscale Model (MM5) was used to simulate the 1998 and 1999 East Asian summer monsoon conditions. Simulations were performed for 1 April-31 August of each year, with initial and lateral boundary conditions provided by the ECMWF analysis. Observations from the 1998 and 1999 GAME/HUBEX experiments were used to evaluate the regional climate simulations. Based on observations, large differences can be found between the 1998 and 1999 meteorological conditions and surface energy budgets at the Shouxian station during the IOPs, with much higher rain intensity but only slightly higher rain frequency in 1998 than 1999. For 1998, although the regional climate model was able to reproduce the general spatial distribution of monthly mean rainfall quite well during the summer monsoon season, large discrepancies can be found in comparing the observed and simulated surface climate and energy fluxes in the HUBEX region. By using Four Dimensional Data Assimilation (FDDA) technique, which constrains the simulated large-scale circulation with observations from 21 soundings in the HUBEX alpha-scale region, both the root mean square error and mean bias in rainfall were greatly reduced. The improvements in simulating rainfall were related to both reduction in errors of precipitation amount and timing. In the control simulation, a mean bias of -63 W/m(2) (-36%) was found in the simulated surface net radiation at Shouxian, which suggest large errors in simulating clouds in the region. With FDDA, the bias was significantly reduced to -23 W/m(2) (-13%), with corresponding reduction of bias in the latent heat flux. This suggests that at least part of the model bias in simulating net radiation is related to errors in simulating the large-scale circulation, which can affect cloud amount and vertical distribution. Comparing the 1998 and 1999 simulations, both without FDDA, smaller biases were found in the surface fluxes during 1999. Percentage biases in the net radiation and latent heat flux were -18% and -33% in 1999 and -36% and -50% in 1998 respectively. Based on observations, large differences in the net surface radiation, and small differences in cloud fraction between the two years suggest that cloud optical depth and/or vertical distribution were very different, with more cloudy conditions observed during 1999. Although the 1999 simulations were sensitive to the cumulus convective parameterizations (Grell scheme versus Kain-Fritsch scheme) as shown by the sensitivity experiments, the large differences in simulation skill between the 1998 and 1999 cases, regardless of the convection schemes used, suggest possible dependence of model errors on cloud properties that deserve further investigations.