P93  Skills and Limitations of Modelling over the Shaken City - WRF 1.5km Christchurch

Heinzeller, Dominikus, Meteorological Service of New Zealand Ltd., Cory Davis and Graham Rye

Following the Christchurch earthquakes in September 2010 and February 2011, we set up a high resolution (1.5km) domain centred over Christchurch to assist earthquake rescue and recovery operations. The geographic location of the city with the marina to the East, the peninsula to the South, the planes and mountain ranges to the West, and the quickly changing weather over New Zealand made this model an interesting object of study. We discuss orographic effects, numerical artifacts arising from nesting a high-resolution domain in difficult terrain, and limitations of physical parameterisations stemming from running WRF at this resolution. We also present verifications of this domain against our operational 4km, 8km and 12km models over New Zealand and show that the higher-resolution models can reproduce some synoptic situations of the Christchurch area better than the lower-resolution domains.