The Landfall and Inland Penetration of a Flood-Producing Atmospheric River in Arizona: Part II: Sensitivity of Modeled Precipitation to Terrain Height and Atmospheric River Orientation

This manuscript documents numerical modeling experiments based on a January 2010 atmospheric river (AR) event that caused extreme precipitation in Arizona. The control experiment (CNTL), using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model with 3-km grid spacing, agrees well with observations. Sensitivity experiments in which 1) model grid spacing decreases sequentially from 81 to 3 km and 2) upstream terrain is elevated are used to assess the sensitivity of interior precipitation amounts and horizontal water vapor fluxes to model grid resolution and height of Baja California terrain. The drying ratio, a measure of airmass drying after passage across terrain, increases with Baja’s terrain height and decreases with coarsened grid spacing. Subsequently, precipitation across Arizona decreases as the Baja terrain height increases, although it changes little with coarsened grid spacing. Northern Baja’s drying ratio ismuch larger than that of southern Baja. Thus, ARs with a southerly orientation, with water vapor transports that can pass south of the higher mountains of northern Baja and then cross the Gulf of California, can produce large precipitation amounts in Arizona. Further experiments are performed using a linear model (LM) of orographic precipitation for a central-Arizona-focused subdomain. The actual incidence angle of the AR (211°) is close to the optimum angle for large region-mean precipitation. Changes in region-mean precipitation amounts are small (~6%) owing to AR angle changes; however, much larger changes in basin-mean precipitation of up to 33% occur within the range of physically plausible AR angles tested. Larger LM precipitation sensitivity is seen with the Baja-terrain-modification experiments than with AR-angle modification.