Advanced Multi-Moment Microphysics for Precipitation and Tropical Cyclone Forecast Improvement within COAMPS

The first major focus of this project is to implement and test an advanced microphysics package capable of predicting up to three moments (total number concentration, mass, and the 6th-moment reflectivity factor) of hydrometeor particle size distributions (PSDs) inside the Navy s Coupled Ocean/Atmosphere Mesoscale Prediction System (COAMPS). The schemes will then be applied to the prediction of tropical cyclones (TC) and continental convective weather, with verification against detailed in-situ and remote- sensing observations. The second major focus is to develop interface software to bring the COAMPS into the multi-model multi-physics storm-scale ensemble forecasting (SSEF) framework of CAPS (Xue et al. 2010), so that it can be run side by side with three other state-of-the-art mesoscale models (WRF-ARW, WRF-NMM and ARPS), in realtime, at 1 to 4 km resolutions, for continental-US (CONUS) sized domains. By using a common set of initial and boundary conditions, we will be able to identify the strengths, weaknesses and potential systematic biases of individual models, and understand the differences and commonalities of physics packages within these models and their performance. The findings will be used to guide the improvement to the COAMPS model. The framework will also be used to systematically test the performance of the multi-moment schemes implemented within COAMPS over a data-rich region.