Modeling Salt‐Verde Watershed Winter Precipitation Using Convection‐Permitting WRF‐Simulations With Water Vapor Tracers

This study characterizes moisture source regions for wintertime precipitation across the Salt‐Verde watershed and Arizona (USA) through use of convection‐permitting numerical experiments. We dynamically downscale three four‐month‐long (i.e., December‐January‐February‐March, or DJFM) winter periods: a representative warm (DJFM 1997–1998), cold (DJFM 1999–2000), and neutral (DJFM 2016–2017) winter, as diagnosed by the mean Sea Surface Temperature (SST) across the El Niño 3.4 region compared to a 1995 to 2019 baseline. We utilize the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model with water vapor tracers (WVTs) to distinguish moisture source contributions to total precipitation across Arizona, as originating from land evapotranspiration, sea evaporation, and external advection. Analysis of our numerical experiments demonstrates that WRF is able to capture the day‐to‐day precipitation events across the complex terrain that is characteristic of the Salt‐Verde watershed, but seasonal accumulated precipitation is consistently overestimated compared to individual station observations. The spatial distribution of wintertime monthly accumulated precipitation across Arizona is well captured by WRF, although the total amount of rainfall is overestimated in some confined areas across the highlands of Arizona. Our convection‐permitting WRF experiments also demonstrate that WVT contributions to total wintertime precipitation are apportioned roughly equally between sea evaporation (contributing 45.6%) across the North America west coast and external advection (contributing 48.1%), with land evapotranspiration playing a minimal role (i.e., the remaining 6.3%). We further conduct single‐domain WRF experiments at non‐convection‐permitting resolution and conclude that local sea evaporation, bounded by 140°W and 100°W, is the primary moisture source region to total wintertime precipitation across the Salt‐Verde watershed and Arizona independent of the remote tropical SST across the El Niño 3.4 region. Plain Language Summary This study characterizes moisture source regions for wintertime precipitation across the Salt‐Verde watershed and Arizona (USA) through use of numerical simulations with the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. We select and simulate three contemporary winter periods based on their respective mean Sea Surface Temperature (SST) across the central tropical Pacific Ocean compared to a 1995 to 2019 baseline. We utilize WRF with water vapor tracers (WVTs)