STRONG CONVECTIVE PRECIPITATION IN THE WEST MEDITERRANEAN. A CASE STUDY

Garcia-Moya, J. A. (Instituto Nacional de Meteorologia, Madrid, Spain)

Convective precipitation is quite important in Spain, not only due to the total amount of rain. The intensity of precipitation is responsible in many cases for damages in Spanish Mediterranean coast.

Because of this fact convection is one of the main issues of the scientific meteorological research at INM and in the framework of the Hirlam group.

A few years ago INM chose the Hirlam forecast system as operational and since then some experiments were carried out in order to improve the behaviour of the model in strong convective situations.

The Hirlam condensation parameterization scheme is the Sundqvist scheme. It has one part for the convective processes and another dealing with condensation and microphysics. The goal is to replace the convective part of the scheme (which is Kuo type) by a mass flux scheme.

A case study with strong convective precipitation (more than 500 mm in a few hours) was chosen in order to assess the performance of the new scheme.


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