Dynamic downscaling of near-surface air temperature at the basin scale using WRF-a case study in the Heihe River Basin, China

The spatial resolution of general circulation models （GCMs） is too coarse to represent regional climate variations at the regional, basin, and local scales required for many environmental modeling and impact assessments. Weather research and forecasting model （WRF） is a nextgeneration, fully compressible, Euler non-hydrostatic mesoscale forecast model with a runtime hydrostatic option. This model is useful for downscaling weather and climate at the scales from one kilometer to thousands of kilometers, and is useful for deriving meteorological parameters required for hydrological simulation too. The objective of this paper is to validate WRF simulating 5 km/ 1 h air temperatures by daily observed data of China Meteorological Administration （CMA） stations, and by hourly in-situ data of the Watershed Allied Telemetry Experimental Research Project. The daily validation shows that the WRF simulation has good agreement with the observed data; the R2 between the WRF simulation and each station is more than 0.93; the absolute of meanbias error （MBE） for each station is less than 2℃; and the MBEs of Ejina, Mazongshan and Alxa stations are near zero, with R2 is more than 0.98, which can be taken as an unbiased estimation. The hourly validation shows that the WRF simulation can capture the basic trend of observed data, the MBE of each site is approximately 2℃, the R2 of each site is more than 0.80, with the highest at 0.95, and the computed and observed surface air temperature series show a significantly similar trend.

Numerical study of the effects of Planetary Boundary Layer structure on the pollutant dispersion within built-up areas

The effects of different Planetary Boundary Layer（PBL） structures on pollutant dispersion processes within two idealized street canyon configurations and a realistic urban area were numerically examined by a Computational Fluid Dynamics（CFD） model. The boundary conditions of different PBL structures/conditions were provided by simulations of the Weather Researching and Forecasting model. The simulated results of the idealized 2D and 3D street canyon experiments showed that the increment of PBL instability favored the downward transport of momentum from the upper flow above the roof to the pedestrian level within the street canyon. As a result, the flow and turbulent fields within the street canyon under the more unstable PBL condition are stronger. Therefore, more pollutants within the street canyon would be removed by the stronger advection and turbulent diffusion processes under the unstable PBL condition. On the contrary, more pollutants would be concentrated in the street canyon under the stable PBL condition. In addition, the simulations of the realistic building cluster experiments showed that the density of buildings was a crucial factor determining the dynamic effects of the PBL structure on the flow patterns. The momentum field within a denser building configuration was mostly transported from the upper flow, and was more sensitive to the PBL structures than that of the sparser building configuration. Finally, it was recommended to use the Mellor-Yamada-Nakanishi-Niino（MYNN） PBL scheme, which can explicitly output the needed turbulent variables, to provide the boundary conditions to the CFD simulation.