P80  Evaluating Transport in the WRF Model along the Californian Coast

Yver, Camille, Graven Heather, University of California San Diego, Lucas, Donald D., Cameron-Smith Philip, LLNL, Keeling Ralph, and Weiss Ray, UCSD/SIO

This paper presents the first step toward the development of a method to provide critical top-down complement to the bottom-up inventories of halocarbons using high frequency observations, forward simulations and inverse methods in California. The Scripps Institution of Oceanography high-frequency halocarbons measurements are located near the Californian coast and therefore the evaluation of the WRF model transport at theses sites is crucial to the project. The performance of the transport model has been investigated by comparing the wind direction, wind speed and temperature at three locations along the coast and one inland using ACARS aicraft reports. Different planetary boundary layer (PBL) schemes as well as nesting options and different initializations have been tested.

All the PBL schemes present similar results with no significant difference and a general good agreement with observations, except in summer when the model sea breeze is too strong. At the coarse 12km resolution, changing the initializations improves the simulations when using ERA-interim. Adding nests also improve the match with the observations. However, no further improvement is observed from increasing the resolution from 4km to 0.8km.