Simulation of meteorological fields over a land-water-land terrain and comparison with observations

A numerical two-dimensional-mesoscale model with a level 1.5 closure scheme for turbulence is described. The model is used to simulate the boundary layer over coastal complex terrain. Meteorological data available from the Øresund land-sea-land terrain experiment are used to study the performance of the model. The model could simulate generally observed complexities in the mean wind and temperature fields. Internal boundary layers over the water and land surfaces were identified by the height of lowest value in the turbulence kinetic energy profile and this showed good agreement with radiosonde (RS) observations.Some disagreements with the data were also noticed, especially near the surface. The wind speed was over-predicted. Attempts were made to improve the model performance by adopting different schemes for model initialisation. Results showed that initialisation with an early model start time and observed wind profile near the inflow boundary improved the performance. The wind speed over-prediction could be further minimised by using a more realistic objective initialisation scheme. The problem centred around the proper estimation of the turbulent diffusion coefficient K through the closure scheme. Despite using the most popular empirical relationships in the level 1.5 closure scheme, these differences persisted. While this needs further investigation, the present model can be used to supply wind fields for practical purposes such as air pollution calculations.