Impact of refined land surface properties on the simulation of a heavy convective rainfall process in the Pearl River Delta region, China

Abstract

The location and occurrence time of convective rainfalls have attracted great public concern as they can lead to terrible disasters. However, the simulation results of convective rainfalls in the Pearl River Delta region often show significant discrepancies from the observations. One of the major causes lies in the inaccurate geographic distribution of land surface properties used in the model simulation of the heavy precipitation. In this study, we replaced the default soil and vegetation datasets of Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model with two refined datasets, i.e. the GlobCover 2009 (GLC2009) land cover map and the Harmonized World Soil Database (HWSD) soil texture, to investigate the impact of vegetation and soil on the rainfall patterns. The result showed that the simulation patterns of convective rainfalls obtained from the coupled refined datasets are more consistent with the observations than those obtained from the default ones. By using the coupled refined land surface datasets, the overlap ratio of high precipitation districts reached 36.3% with a variance of 28.5 km from the observed maximum rainfall position, while those of the default United States Geological Survey (USGS) dataset and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) dataset are 17.0%/ 32.8 km and 24.9%/49.0 km, respectively. The simulated total rainfall amount and occurrence time using the coupled refined datasets are the closest to the observed peak values. In addition, the HWSD soil data has improved the accuracy of the simulated precipitation amount, and the GLC2009 land cover data also did better in catching the early peak time.

A statistical study of pre‐summer hourly extreme rainfall over the Pearl River Delta metropolitan region during 2008–2017

“…2015; Chen et al ., ; Luo et al ., ; Tian et al ., ). Most of the previous studies have been conducted using diagnostic methods with limited available observations, or they have performed numerically sensitive experiments with relatively high spatiotemporal resolution models to study individual rainfall event (Chang et al ., ; Wang et al ., ; Chen et al ., ; Zhang et al ., ). For example, Wang et al .…”

Impact of Land-Use Change on Atmospheric Environment Using Refined Land Surface Properties in the Pearl River Delta, China

“…Besides, the previous studies mainly used the WRF default land-use datasets, United States Geological Survey (USGS) and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), to represent the distribution of urban land-use types in 1990s and 2000s [12][13][14][15], but the land-use types in PRD region are changing with the rapid urbanization. In this paper, the refined surface properties of the Global Land Cover 2009 (GLC2009) dataset were used to present the land cover conditions in the 2010s, which is more consistent with the current underlying surface situation in the PRD region [16], and Global Land Cover 2000 (GLC2000) dataset was chosen to present the land cover conditions in the 2000s. Two-month simulations in 2014 (January and July) in conjunction with two different landuse scenarios were conducted by the WRF-Chem model, to systematically investigate the impacts of land-use changes on the seasonal variability of atmospheric environment in PRD region.…”

Impacts of Climate Change and Land Use/Cover Change on Regional Hydrological Processes: Case of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area

“…On the one hand, urbanization may lead to a decrease in the amount of ET and infiltration by reducing permeable surfaces, plant transpiration, and canopy retention (Chen et al, 2011;Zhang and Liang, 2018). On the other hand, conversion from herbaceous to cropland may result in an increase in the SM for vegetation growth (Atchley and Maxwell, 2011;Chang et al, 2014).…”