Planet Boundary Layer Parameterization in Weather Research and Forecasting (WRFv3.5): Assessment of Performance in High Spatial Resolution Simulations in Complex Topography of Mexico

Abstract

This paper presents the application of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF version 3.5) with high spatial resolution (3 and 1 km) testing four Planet Boundary Layer (PBL) schemes to the complex topography of Mexico in different numerical experiments that have tried to find the best configuration. The WRF is a Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) model giving support for weather forecasting and modeling in Chemical Transport (CTM) or Air Quality Models as CMAQ or CHIMERE. For the above, the objectives in this work were assess the performance, the best grid parameterization, meteorological initial conditions, temporal resolution, time step and PBL schemes used in order to minimize the execution time and to show changes in speedup and efficiency. Mare Nostrum III supercomputer was used for the computational processing in the cluster. The computational performance indicators were execution time, speedup and efficiency. The sensitivity analysis was performed using the mean bias (MB) and root mean square error (RMSE) from variables obtained by WRFv3.5 such as temperature, wind-speed, sea level pressure and the METAR Veracruz airport station observations. The results show that Mellor-Yamada-Janjic (MYJ) scheme was better in computational parallel execution with at least 8 processors and a time step of 18 seconds. The sensitivity analyses show that time step is not a key in the accuracy of the meteorological values obtained. It is necessary consider the lack of data in METAR stations in Mexico.