Numerical Experiments on the Spin-up Time for Seasonal-Scale Regional Climate Modeling

In this paper, the numerical experiments on the issue of spin-up time for seasonal-scale regional climate modeling were conducted with the newly Regional Climate Model (RegCM3), in the case of the abnormal climate event during the summer of 1998 in China. To test the effect of spin-up time on the regional climate simulation results for such abnormal climate event, a total of 11 experiments were performed with different spin-up time from 10 days to 6 months, respectively. The simulation results show that, for the meteorological variables in the atmosphere, the model would be running in "climate mode" after 4-8-day spin-up time, then,it is independent of the spin-up time basically, and the simulation errors are mainly caused by the model' s failure in describing the atmospheric processes over the model domain. This verifies again that the regional climate modeling is indeed a lateral boundary condition problem as demonstrated by earlier research work. The simulated mean precipitation rate over each subregion is not sensitive to the spin-up time, but the precipitation scenario is somewhat different for the experiment with different spin-up time, which shows that there exists the uncertainty in the simulation to precipitation scenario, and such a uncertainty exhibits more over the areas where heavy rainfall happened. Generally, for monthly-scale precipitation simulation, a spin-up time of 1 month is enough, whereas a spin-up time of 2 months is better for seasonal-scale one. Furthermore , the relationship between the precipitation simulation error and the advancement/withdrawal of East Asian summer monsoon was analyzed. It is found that the variability of correlation coe cient for precipitation is more signi cant over the areas where the summer monsoon is predominant. Therefore, the model's capability in reproducing precipitation features is related to the heavy rainfall processes associated with the advancement/withdrawal of East Asian summer monsoon, which suggests that it is necessary to develop a more reliable parameterization scheme to capture the convective precipitation of heavy rainfall processes associated with the activities of East Asian summer monsoon, so as to improve the climate modeling over China.