The Effects of Typhoon Initialization and Dropwindsonde Data Assimilation on Direct and Indirect Heavy Rainfall Simulation in WRF model

A number of heavy rainfall events on the Korean Peninsula are indirectly influenced by tropical cyclones (TCs) when they are located in southeastern China. In this study, a heavy rainfall case in the middle Korean region is selected to examine the influence of typhoon simulation performance on predictability of remote rainfall over Korea as well as direct rainfall over Taiwan. Four different numerical experiments are conducted using Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model, toggling on and off two different improvements on typhoon in the model initial condition (IC), which are TC bogussing initialization and dropwindsonde observation data assimilation (DA). The Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory TC initialization algorithm is implemented to generate the bogused vortex instead of the initial typhoon, while the airborne observation obtained from dropwindsonde is applied by WRF Three-dimensional variational data assimilation. Results show that use of both TC initialization and DA improves predictability of TC track as well as rainfall over Korea and Taiwan. Without any of IC improvement usage, the intensity of TC is underestimated during the simulation. Using TC initialization alone improves simulation of direct rainfall but not of indirect rainfall, while using DA alone has a negative impact on the TC track forecast. This study confirms that the well-suited TC simulation over southeastern China improves remote rainfall predictability over Korea as well as TC direct rainfall over Taiwan.