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ARS Home » Pacific West Area » Boise, Idaho » Northwest Watershed Research Center » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #65727
Title: DERIVATION OF WIND AND PRECIPITATION FIELDS AT THE WATERSHED SCALE USING TWO ATMOSPHERIC MODELS

Author
item Johnson, Gregory
item DAWSON, PAUL - BOISE STATE UNIVERSITY
item WANG, DAHONG - UNIVERSITY OF IDAHO

Submitted to: Climate and Weather Research Workshop Proceedings
Publication Type: Proceedings
Publication Acceptance Date: 9/15/1995
Publication Date: N/A
Citation: N/A

Interpretive Summary: For a variety of applications it is useful to know how weather conditions are distributed across a specific region. Until recently, only rough estimates of these conditions could be made using inferences from some known, base station. The spatial resolution of several atmospheric models now makes more quantitative estimates of wind, precipitation and other elements possible, even over fairly small domains. Two such models were tested for their performance in estimating meteorological conditions over a small, well-instrumented, mountainous watershed in southwest Idaho. Results indicated that both models fairly reasonably estimated wind and precipitation during a late winter storm in 1993.

Technical Abstract: The performance of two atmospheric models in simulating spatial fields of wind speed and direction over a mountainous watershed was validated during a late winter storm. One was a simple, analytical model of neutrally-stratified boundary-layer flow over complex terrain, while the other was a prognostic, three-dimensional code containing microphysical subroutines capable of quantitative precipitation estimates, which were also verified using field data. The utility of using each model for various applications, including hydrologic simulations, is discussed. Sensitivity analyses of resolution-dependence in the prognostic model were also conducted and are reported here for a single-storm simulation.