Comparison of simulated precipitation over East Asia in two regional models with hydrostatic and nonhydrostatic dynamical cores

This study examines the characteristics of a nonhydrostatic dynamical core compared to a corresponding hydrostatic dynamical core in the Regional Model Program (RMP) of the Global/Regional Integrated Model system (GRIMs), a spectral model for regional forecasts, focusing on simulated precipitation over Korea. This kind of comparison is also executed in the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) finite-difference model with the same physics package used in the RMP. Overall, it is found that the nonhydrostatic dynamical core experiment accurately reproduces the heavy rainfall near Seoul, South Korea, on a 3-km grid, relative to the results from the hydrostatic dynamical core in both models. However, the characteristics of nonhydrostatic effects on the simulated precipitation differ between the RMP and WRF Model. The RMP with the nonhydrostatic dynamical core improves the local maximum, which is exaggerated in the hydrostatic simulation. The hydrostatic simulation of the WRF Model displaces the major precipitation area toward the mountainous region along the east coast of the peninsula, which is shifted into the observed area in the nonhydrostatic simulation. In the simulation of a summer monsoonal rainfall, these nonhydrostatic effects are negligible in the RMP, but the simulated monsoonal rainfall is still influenced by the dynamical core in the WRF Model even at a 27-km grid spacing. One of the reasons for the smaller dynamical core effect in the RMP seems to be the relatively strong horizontal diffusion, resulting in a smaller grid size of the hydrostatic limit.