A note on horizontal resolution dependence for monsoon rainfall simulations

Abstract

The motivation for this study came from recent results of an Atmospheric Model Inter-comparison Project (AMIP) coordinated by the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory at Livermore, California. That project included a review of seasonal monsoon simulations from 13 different atmospheric models over the world. Most of the models used a horizontal resolution of roughly 300 km. The seasonal monsoon simulations from these models varied significantly. The poor performance by these models stems in part from the use of the coarse resolution. The purpose of this note is to show that by using the same model physics and lower boundary conditions, such as snow/ice cover and sea surface temperatures, the use of the higher horizontal resolution does have a stronger positive impact on the skill of monthly rainfall when compared to a lower horizontal resolution. In this note we present the results of such a comparison between the horizontal resolutions of T42 and T170. These studies are carried out for the prescribed lower boundary specification of sea surface temperatures and snow/ice cover with the help of an Atmospheric General Circulation Model.