Analysis and evaluation of WRF microphysical schemes for deep moist convection over Southeastern South America (SESA) using microwave satellite observations and radiative transfer simulations

Abstract

In the present study, three meteorological events of extreme deep moist convection, characteristic of Southeastern South America (SESA), are considered to conduct a systematic evaluation of the microphysical parameterizations available in the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model by undertaking a direct comparison between satellite-based simulated and observed microwave radiances. A research radiative transfer model, the Atmospheric Radiative Transfer Simulator (ARTS), is coupled with WRF under three different microphysical parameterizations (WSM6, WDM6 and Thompson). Since the main difficulty encountered in the characterization of the microwave scattering signal arises from the complex and variable nature of microphysics properties of frozen hydrometeors, the present study further aims at improving the understanding of their optical properties. The bulk optical properties are computed by integrating the single scattering properties of the Liu (2008) DDA single scattering database across the particle size distributions parametrized by the different WRF schemes in a consistent manner, introducing the equal-mass pproach. The equal mass approach consists in describing the optical properties of the WRF snow and graupel hydrometeors with the optical properties of habits in the DDA database whose dimensions might be different (<i>D</i>´_max) but whose mass is conserved. The performance of the radiative transfer simulations is evaluated by comparing the simulations with the available coincident microwave observations up to 190 GHz (with observations from TMI, MHS, and SSMI/S) using the Chi-square test. Good greement is obtained with all observations provided special care is taken to represent the scattering properties of the snow and graupel species.