Verification of two months, April and May 1997, of 48-h mesoscale model simulations of the atmospheric state around Greenland are presented. The simulations are performed with a modified version of The Pennsylvania State University–National Center for Atmospheric Research fifth-generation Mesoscale Model (MM5), referred to as the Polar MM5. Global atmospheric analyses as well as automatic weath...

The mesoscale numerical weather prediction model MM5, the 5 generation Pennsylvania State University/NCAR Mesoscale Model, uses a global land-use map to set the physical parameters on the surface characteristics to model the soil-atmosphere processes. These parameters are albedo, emissivity, thermal inertia, roughness length and soil moisture. A new estimation of soil parameters is done for the...

A physically based retrieval algorithm was developed to estimate snowfall over land. The retrieval algorithm relies on the MM5 model that generates the vertical structure of a snow cloud, including snow mass, snow particle effective diameter, and water vapor. The MM5 cloud simulation was used to provide statistics for generating the cloud characteristics. The snow cloud profile and surface emis...

The assimilation of Special Sensor Microwave Imager (SSM/I) data into the Mesoscale Model 5 (MM5) allows for improving the weather forecast. However the results suggested an update the Radiative Transfer Equation (RTE) within the three-dimensional variational (3DVAR) algorithm which is tailored for non rainy conditions only. To this purpose, a new RTE algorithm is tested, in order to account fo...

Numerical models such as the Mesoscale Model 5 (MM5) or the Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF) are used by meteorologists in the prediction and the study of hurricanes. The outputs from such models vary greatly depending on the model, the initialization conditions, the simulation resolution and the computational resources available. The overwhelming amount of data that is generated ca...

It is widely known that the snow cover has a major influence on the hydrology of Alpine watersheds. Snow acts as temporal storage for precipitation during the winter season. The stored water is later released as snowmelt and represents an important component of water supply for the downstream population of large mountain-foreland river systems worldwide. Modelling the amount and position of the...