A new Planetary Boundary Layer model and its application to heavy rain modeling

A new Planetary Boundary Layer (PBL) model (namely MY-4 in this paper) was developed with reference to Mellor-Yamada’s Level 4 turbulent closure concept. Having been coupled with a meso-scale model MM5, MY-4 was util-ized to simulate a heavy-rain process, which took place over South China during June 8-9, 1998. Its model outputs indi-cated that the rainfall process was well captured in terms of its intensity and geographical distribution. More importantly, in comparison with MM5’s original boundary layer models, MY-4 made the following improvements: (1) MY-4 not only simulated the major weather systems like low vortexes and low-level jets more accurately, thus improving the general weather pattern of the rainfall process, but it was also capa-ble of restraining the occurrence of false rainfall centers with maximum precipitation amounts exceeding 160 mm. (2) Having been compared with the wind profile observed at Hong Kong, it revealed that MY-4 could reproduce the wind speed fluctuations in a short time scale reasonably well, which was not yet achieved in the original PBL models in MM5. Furthermore, a more detailed comparative study was made on the results simulated by MY-4 and a PBL model (which is based on Mellor-Yamada’s Level 2.5 concept) re-spectively. It showed that the contributions of turbulences generated by the two categories of PBL models to the wind fields at a lower atmosphere were increasingly different even in the first 1-2 hours of integrations. As the analysis dem-onstrated, under the nonlinear interactions within the meso-scale MM5 model, it was the turbulences in the boundary layer that had the most important impacts on the final model outputs and MY-4 seemed to better reflect this turbulent process, hence leading to the aforementioned im-provements.

A new Planetary Boundary Layer （PBL） model （namely MY-4 in this paper） was developed with reference to Mellor-Yamada＇s Level 4 turbulent closure concept. Having been coupled with a meso-scale model MM5, MY-4 was utilized to simulate a heavy-rain process, which took place over South China during June 8-9, 1998. Its model outputs indicated that the rainfall process was well captured in terms of its intensity and geographical distribution. More importantly, in comparison with MM5＇s original boundary layer models, MY-4 made the following improvements： （1） MY-4 not only simulated the major weather systems like low vortexes and low-level jets more accurately, thus improving the general weather pattern of the rainfall process, but it was also capable of restraining the occurrence of false rainfall centers with maximum precipitation amounts exceeding 160 mm. （2） Having been compared with the wind profile observed at Hong Kong, it revealed that MY-4 could reproduce the wind speed fluctuations in a short time scale reasonably well, which was not yet achieved in the original PBL models in MM5. Furthermore, a more detailed comparative study was made on the results simulated by MY-4 and a PBL model （which is based on Mellor-Yamada＇s Level 2.5 concept） respectively. It showed that the contributions of turbulences generated by the two categories of PBL models to the wind fields at a lower atmosphere were increasingly different even in the first 1-2 hours of integrations. As the analysis demonstrated, under the nonlinear interactions within the meso-seale MM5 model, it was the turbulences in the boundary layer that had the most important impacts on the final model outputs and MY-4 seemed to better reflect this turbulent process, hence leading to the aforementioned improvements.