The role of the land surface processes in the rainfall generated by a landfall typhoon: A simulation of the typhoon Sepat (2007)

Landfall tropical cyclones are a major kind of severe weather affecting China. The typhoon Sepat, declassified as tropical storm after its landfalling, caused a continuous heavy rainfall event over China mainland from 19th to 25th August, 2007. The storm cyclone resided over the Hunan province for 60 hours, causing observed accumulated precipitation larger than 300 mm in a large area of the Hunan province and leading severe flood events. This event was simulated using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model coupled with the surface layer scheme UTOPIA. The model was able to reproduce the main characteristics of the event, including the typhoon track and the rainfall field and timing. In addition, three sets of sensitivity experiments have been performed. In the first one, the effects of different land surface schemes (RUC, NOAH and UTOPIA) coupled with WRF on the precipitation, sensible and latent heat flux fields associated with the Typhoon Sepat (2007) were investigated. The second set of sensitivity experiments analyzed the role of the surface fluxes (sensible and latent heat flux) on the typhoon evolution. The third set of sensitivity experiments regarded the initialization of the soil moisture content. These experiments showed that both latent and sensible heat fluxes sustained this landfalling typhoon, maintaining the spiral structure of rain belt. Among the two fluxes, the latent heat one played a major role in determining the intensity, the track and the rainfall distribution of the typhoon. In addition, the correct initialization of the soil moisture content has reveled a fundamental parameter to be initialized in order to correctly evaluate the distribution and intensity of the rain field. The intercomparison between the three different land surface schemes coupled with WRF showed that the WRF-UTOPIA and WRF-NOAH outputs seem comparable between each other and physically most realistic than those of WRF-RUC. These analyses were helpful to understand the evolution and the development of the landfalling typhoon, and demonstrated that WRF-UTOPIA and WRF-NOAH could be considered a good tool for managing the risk evaluation connected with the occurrence of such events at regional scale.