UCLA

To better understand the regional climate model (RCM) performance for East Asian summer climate and the influencing factors, this study evaluated the dynamic downscaling ability of the Weather Research Forecast (WRF) RCM. According to the comprehensive comparison studies on different physical processes and experimental settings, the optimal combination of WRF model setups can be obtained for East Asian precipitation and temperature simulations. Furthermore, based on the optimal combination, when compared with climate observations, WRF shows high ability to downscale NCEP DOE Reanalysis-2, which provided initial and lateral boundary conditions for the WRF, especially for the precipitation simulation due to the better simulated low-level water vapor flux. However, the strengthened Western North Pacific Subtropical High (WPSH) from WRF simulation results in the positive anomaly for summer rainfall.