ON THE SENSITIVITY OF PRECIPITATION FORECASTS TO THE MOIST PHYSICS AND THE HORIZONTAL RESOLUTION OF NUMERICAL MODEL*

The impacts of the enhanced model's moist physics and horizontal resolution upon the QPFs(quantitative precipitation forecasts) are investigated by applying the HIRLAM(high resolution limited area model) to the summer heavy-rain cases in China.The performance of the control run,for which a 0.5°×0.5°grid spacing and a traditional "grid-box supersaturation removal+Kuo type convective paramerization" are used as the moist physics,is compared with that of the sensitivity runs with an enhanced model's moist physics(Sundqvist scheme) and an increased horizontal resolution(0.25°×0.25°),respectively.The results show:(1) The enhanced moist physics scheme(Sundqvist scheme),by introducing the cloud water content as an additional prognostic variable and taking into account briefly of the microphysics involved in the cloud-rain conversion,does bring improvements in the model's QPFs.Although the deteriorated QPFs also occur occasionally,the improvements are found in the majority of the cases,indicating the great potential for the improvement of QPFs by enhancing the model's moist physics.(2) By increasing the model's horizontal resolution from 0.5°×0.5°,which is already quite high compared with that of the conventional atmospheric soundings,to 0.25°×0.25°without the simultaneous enhancement in model physics and objective analysis,the improvements in QPFs are very limited.With higher resolution,although slight amelioration in locating the rainfall centers and in resolving some finer structures of precipitation pattern are made,the number of the mis-predicted fine structures in rainfall field increases with the enhanced model resolution as well.