Benefits of kilometer-scale climate modeling for winds in complex terrain: Strong versus weak winds

Abstract

The existence of many different wind types in complex terrain and the difficulty of obtaining representative wind observations hinder the analysis of the general benefits of high-resolution climate modeling for winds. We show that the added value of kilometer (km)-scale modeling is particularly pronounced in mountainous terrain and increases substantially with wind speed, with the km-scale model and observations reaching twice larger speeds than a coarser model with 12 km grid spacing. At the same time, synoptically calm conditions are prone to local thermally generated circulations, such as slope flows with typically weak winds, whose modeling results can also be considerably affected by the model resolution. We therefore focus on the mountainous region of the southern Scandinavian Mountains and analyze the winds at two ends of the wind distribution: very strong winds, generally forced by large-scale weather systems, and local, thermally generated winds in synoptically calm conditions. Strong winds in the present climate are influenced more by the terrain height and high model resolution than by the large-scale forcing, while the future change is mostly governed by the global-model large-scale circulation change. For the thermal circulations in summer, in contrast to the coarse model, the km-scale model captures glacier downslope wind in the high mountains and the resulting convergence zone as well as the increased cloud cover where the glacier wind meets the daytime upslope wind. The future change in thermal circulations is primarily influenced by the future temperature change and the high model resolution. Because the future temperature changes are considerably less uncertain than the changes in large-scale circulation, the future of local thermal circulations can be estimated with less uncertainty compared to stronger winds.