High-Resolution Modeling of the Atmosphere

Numerical weather prediction (NWP) and climate modeling have gone through significant developments in recent years, with models reaching kilometer-scale horizontal grid spacings and producing high-resolution data. Such a high resolution is a valuable tool in mountain regions, both for process understanding and as input for other environmental models. High horizontal resolution leads to a more realistic representation of topography and an explicit representation of processes like convection. It has been shown that such simulations can, in general, lead to better forecasting and climate simulations, but this does not hold for all cases, especially over complex mountainous terrain. A successful simulation does not only depend on the terrain representation but also on the quality of input data, the land-use representation, the choice of parameterizations, the model setup, and last but not least, on the quality of observational data used for evaluation. The observational data is known to suffer the most over complex mountainous terrain, mostly due to a sparse observational network that is not able to capture complex features of mountain weather and climate. This session invites submissions from a broad range of NWP and climate modeling and applications over mountainous terrain, such as:

1. Model evaluation;


2. Process studies;


3. High-resolution simulations down to the large eddy simulations;


4. Newest developments and improvements of model set-ups and parameterizations; and


5. Newest developments of observational datasets.