Simulations of wintertime precipitation in the vicinity of Japan: Sensitivity to fine-scale distributions of sea surface temperature

Abstract

In the present study, the winter precipitation in the vicinity of Japan is simulated by the Weather Research Forecasting model by using two sets of sea surface temperature (SST) data with different spatial resolutions. On comparing the simulated mean precipitations, we found that SST resolution has a significant influence on the simulated precipitation along the northwestern coast of Japan; in this region, the coarse-resolution SST data have a systematic cold bias. In the simulation using high-resolution SST data, the moisture supply to the atmosphere increases over the relatively warm coastal SST. The increase in the moisture supply leads to an increase in the moisture convergence near the mountain ranges in Japan on the Japan Sea side, leading to an increase in precipitation amount. The result suggests that coastal SST must be carefully used for dynamic downscaling of the climate simulation, in particular, in Japan, which is surrounded by boundary currents. We also found that a small-scale SST anomaly in the Kuroshio-Oyashio Extension (KOE) region near Japan enhances the interannual variance of local precipitation in the regions downwind of the SST anomaly. The associated anomalous ascent extends to the midtroposphere and is accompanied by an increase in cloud ice, suggesting that the interannual SST variation over the KOE region may affect the free atmosphere. Moisture budget analysis indicates the influence of moisture advection by mean wind on the spatial phase difference between the SST and precipitation anomalies. Copyright 2010 by the American Geophysical Union.