Sensitivity of monsoon circulation and precipitation over India to model horizontal resolution and orographic effects

Abstract

A triple-nested regional weather prediction model was used to investigate the effects of the model horizontal resolution and orography on southwest monsoon precipitation over India. Numerical experiments with different resolution topography and different horizontal resolution model domains were conducted. Simulation results indicate that both the distribution and intensity of simulated southwest monsoon precipitation over India is highly sensitive to model horizontal resolution and topography. The model with a finer resolution is able to predict mesoscale organization of rainfall over the land mass. Rainfall predicted over the coarse domain is much less than that observed owing to its unrealistic representation of orographic effects and mesoscale forcings. Simulated wind speed, surface pressure, and latent and sensible heat flux distributions are also sensitive to the model resolution. Larger values and more detailed structure of the distribution of the wind speed and latent and sensible heat fluxes are simulated in the finer domains.