New regional modeling products for Alaska: focus on hydroclimatology

Description

The arctic hydrologic cycle is known to be changing quickly, as air temperatures increase, glaciers melt, and permafrost thaws. Because the region is data-sparse, climate models and reanalyses can be important tools for studying hydroclimatological change. Grid cell size and scale-dependent physics in climate models, however, impact the resolution of key hydroclimatological processes. An effort is described wherein several new regional models and reanalyses are compared to raw and bias-corrected observations for the Alaska domain for the period 2000–2008. This period corresponds to the DOE’s observational record at Barrow. These model simulations include a 15-km run of the Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF) laterally forced by the Community Atmospheric Model 3.1 (CAM3.1), a 15-km run of WRF laterally forced by the National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) reanalysis, 1-degree CAM-HOMME (a newly developed dynamically core for CAM), a reconstructed precipitation product derived from the NASA Catchment Land Surface Model, the Arctic Regional Reanalysis, and station data.