Online dynamical downscaling of temperature and precipitation within the iLOVECLIM model (version 1.1)

This paper presents the inclusion of an online dynamical downscaling of temperature and precipitation within the model of intermediate complexity i LOVECLIM v1.1. We describe the following methodology to generate temperature and precipitation fields on a 40 km × 40 km Cartesian grid of the Northern...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Geoscientific Model Development
Main Authors: Quiquet, Aurélien, Roche, Didier M., Dumas, Christophe, Paillard, Didier
Format: Other/Unknown Material
Language:English
Published: 2018
Subjects:
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-11-453-2018
https://gmd.copernicus.org/articles/11/453/2018/
Description
Summary:This paper presents the inclusion of an online dynamical downscaling of temperature and precipitation within the model of intermediate complexity i LOVECLIM v1.1. We describe the following methodology to generate temperature and precipitation fields on a 40 km × 40 km Cartesian grid of the Northern Hemisphere from the T21 native atmospheric model grid. Our scheme is not grid specific and conserves energy and moisture in the same way as the original climate model. We show that we are able to generate a high-resolution field which presents a spatial variability in better agreement with the observations compared to the standard model. Although the large-scale model biases are not corrected, for selected model parameters, the downscaling can induce a better overall performance compared to the standard version on both the high-resolution grid and on the native grid. Foreseen applications of this new model feature include the improvement of ice sheet model coupling and high-resolution land surface models.