Development of a 5-km-Mesh Cloud-System-Resolving Regional Climate Model at the Meteorological Research Institute

A 5-km-mesh nonhydrostatic cloud-system-resolving regional climate model (NHM-5km) has been developed at the Meteorological Research Institute (MRI) of the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) by improving upon the JMA operational mesoscale model (MSM). Three major changes have been made to MSM: the Kain-Frisch convective parameterization scheme has been improved to reduce the incidence of false predictions of rainfall areas along coastlines during the warm season, a spectral nudging method has been introduced to avoid phase-gap between the inner model (NHM-5km) and the outer model, and a Simple Biosphere model has been applied for sophisticated representation of land surface processes. This article presents details of the first two of these modifications. A present-day climate simulation is performed using NHM-5km by nesting within the results of a 20-km-mesh atmospheric global climate model (MRI-AGCM3.2S). Taylor's skill score is used to compare the performances of NHM-5km and MRI-AGCM3.2S in terms of reproducing the spatial pattern of precipitation-based extreme indices over the Japanese Islands. The comparison shows that NHM-5km yields a significant improvement in reproducing the present-day climatology (e.g., the maximum number of consecutive dry days and the simple daily precipitation intensity index), suggesting that NHM-5km is a reliable tool for accurately predicting future changes in extreme weather at a fine spatial resolution.