P59 Evaluation of WRF Model Performance in Simulating Major Surface Energy Fluxes over Southern Ontario, Canada

Kamal, Mostofa, Richard Petrone, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, Deyong Wen, Air Quality Research Division, Environment and Climate Change Canada, Toronto, Canada

The Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model simulations were used to evaluate the WRF model's ability to simulate the sensitivity of major energy flux components (i.e., sensible heat flux (SHF), latent heat flux (LHF), and ground heat flux (GHF)) to changes in planetary boundary layer (PBL) parameterizations and annual climatological conditions. WRF reproduced the diurnal variability of the SHF very well but systematically overestimated LHF compared to eddy covariance (EC) tower measurement for June of 2007 and 2008. For the interior of all three domains in July 2002, spatial distribution was overestimated for SHF and underestimated for LHF, with biases ranging from -30 to +30 W/m² over most of the area when compared to North America Land Data Assimilation System (NLDAS) gridded analysis. WRF showed little sensitivity to the choice of PBL scheme, except for January 2002's LHF. If forced with different annual climatological boundary conditions, such as extreme cold in January 2014 and below average temperatures in January 2015, the model's simulated spatial distribution of energy flux bias indicates behavior that clearly differs from NLDAS analysis. These results reaffirm the need for extensive sensitivity analysis, including model error characteristics, research, and operational modeling.