Simulation of subgrid orographic precipitation with an embedded 2-D cloud-resolving model

By explicitly resolving cloud-scale processes with embedded two-dimensional (2-D) cloud-resolving models (CRMs), superparameterized global atmospheric models have successfully simulated various atmospheric events over a wide range of time scales. Up to now, however, such models have not included the effects of topography on the CRM grid scale. We have used both 3-D and 2-D CRMs to simulate the effects of topography with prescribed large-scale winds. The 3-D CRM is used as a benchmark. The results show that the mean precipitation can be simulated reasonably well by using a 2-D representation of topography as long as the statistics of the topography such as the mean and standard deviation are closely represented. It is also shown that the use of a set of two perpendicular 2-D grids can significantly reduce the error due to a 2-D representation of topography.