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Validation of climate-mode MM5-simulations for the European Alpine Region

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Abstract

Climate mode simulations using MM5 have been conducted over Western Europe on a 45-km grid driven by ECMWF’s ERA40 reanalysis data. We focus our validation on the Alpine region and the Alpine foreland. A reference experiment comprising the years of 1991 to 2000 shows reasonable correspondence to station measurements and a gridded precipitation climatology of the Alps. Also, the mean monthly diurnal cycle of near-surface temperature and dew point temperature verified in the Alpine foreland compares quite well to station data showing some minor discrepancies mainly in the afternoon that seem to be common to regional models. Furthermore, a set of sensitivity experiments was conducted for the years of 1996 to 1999. This set was spanned on the one hand by three convection schemes to get an estimate of the possible range of simulated precipitation amounts inherent to the MM5-system. On the other hand, two different formulations of the horizontal numerical diffusion were investigated with respect to their influence on simulated precipitation in mountainous terrain. It was found that the impact of the formulation of numerical diffusion is similarly large as the sensitivity to the convection scheme, with computing diffusion along the terrain-following coordinate surfaces being clearly worse than computing it in a truly horizontal manner.

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Acknowledgements

The presented study was funded by the German Ministry of Research and Education (BMBF) in the framework of the project GLOWA. The authors are also grateful to the German Weather Service (DWD), the Austrian Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics (ZAMG), and the Austrian Hydrological Service (HZB) for providing the observations used to validate our simulations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Meteorologisches Institut der Universität München, Theresienstraße 37, 80333, Munich, Germany

    Andreas Pfeiffer

  2. Deutscher Wetterdienst, Frankfurter Straße 135, 63067, Offenbach, Germany

    Günther Zängl

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  1. Andreas Pfeiffer
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  2. Günther Zängl
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Correspondence to Andreas Pfeiffer.

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Pfeiffer, A., Zängl, G. Validation of climate-mode MM5-simulations for the European Alpine Region. Theor Appl Climatol 101, 93–108 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-009-0199-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00704-009-0199-5

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