A new regional climate model operating at the meso-gamma scale: performance over Europe

There are well-known difficulties to run numerical weather prediction (NWP) and climate models at resolutions traditionally referred to as ‘grey-zone’ (~3–8 km) where deep convection is neither completely resolved by the model dynamics nor completely subgrid. In this study, we describe the performance of an operational NWP model, HARMONIE, in a climate setting (HCLIM), run at two different resolutions (6 and 15 km) for a 10-yr period (1998–2007). This model has a convection scheme particularly designed to operate in the ‘grey-zone’ regime, which increases the realism and accuracy of the time and spatial evolution of convective processes compared to more traditional parametrisations. HCLIM is evaluated against standard observational data sets over Europe as well as high-resolution, regional, observations. Not only is the regional climate very well represented but also higher order climate statistics and smaller scale spatial characteristics of precipitation are in good agreement with observations. The added value when making climate simulations at ~5 km resolution compared to more typical regional climate model resolutions is mainly seen for the very rare, high-intensity precipitation events. HCLIM at 6 km resolution reproduces the frequency and intensity of these events better than at 15 km resolution and is in closer agreement with the high-resolution observations.

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