Evaluation of the WRF model for simulating surface winds and the diurnal cycle of wind speed for the small island state of Fiji

Evaluation of the performance of the WRF model is carried out for simulating the surface winds and the diurnal cycle of wind speed for the small island developing state of Fiji at a 1.33 km by 1.33 km grid resolution using 1deg gridded data from NCEP-FNL. Simulations are performed for an austral summer (January 2017) and an austral winter (July 2017) month using the dynamical downscaling and the two-way nested approach. A set of physics parameterization schemes together with topo_wind = 1, 2 and ysu_topdown_pblmix = 1 physics settings associated with YSU PBL scheme are used to correct the surface winds and the diurnal cycle of wind speed. The results reveal that the WRF model is able to capture the surface winds and the diurnal cycle of wind speed on the windward side. Surface winds on the leeward side and the outer islands, show positive bias especially at nighttime for January and at both the day and night time for July. The statistical evaluation of all stations for January (July) showed a bias of 1.16 m/s (1.89 m/s), RMSE of 2.40 m/s (3.14 m/s), STDE of 1.88 m/s (2.08 m/s) and diurnal cycle correlation of 0.74 (0.68) using topo_wind = 2 and ysu_topdown_pblmix = 1.