Skip to main content
Dryad

Climatology of Sundowner Winds in Coastal Santa Barbara, California, Based on 30 yr High Resolution WRF Downscaling

Cite this dataset

Jones, Charles; Carvalho, Leila M.V.; Duine, Gert-Jan; Zigner, Katelyn (2022). Climatology of Sundowner Winds in Coastal Santa Barbara, California, Based on 30 yr High Resolution WRF Downscaling [Dataset]. Dryad. https://doi.org/10.25349/D9S90S

Abstract

Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model version 4.0.1 was used to produce a 32 yr high-resolution (1km horizontal grid spacing and hourly resolution) downscaling climatology over Santa Barbara County.

Data in this repository contain surface meteorological variables from WRF downscaling simulations during a series of Sundowner wind events. The list of events is: 
-- Painted Cave Fire 1990: 26-June, 27-June, 28-June
-- Tea Fire 2008: 13-November, 14-November
-- 2004: 24-April, 27-April, 28-April, 2-May, 3-May
-- Jesusita Fire 2009: 5-May, 6-May, 7-May, 8-May, 
-- Sherpa Fire 2016: 15-June, 16-June
-- Whittier Fire 2017: 6-July, 8-July
-- 2017: 11-March, 12-March

Users interested in accessing the entire 32-year WRF downscaling dataset, please contact: Charles Jones at cjones@eri.ucsb.edu

 

 

Methods

WRF model version 4.0.1 was used to produce a 32 yr high-resolution downscaling climatology over Santa Barbara County. WRF was configured with 4 two-way nested grids with 27 km, 9 km, 3 km and 1 km horizontal grid spacings. WRF was configured with 55 vertical levels and model top at 50 hPa. The configuration used numerical parameterizations for microphysics (Single moment 6-class, Hong and Lim, 2006), long-wave and short-wave radiation transfer (RRTMG, Iacono et al., 2008), Noah multi-parameterization options (Noah-MP) (Niu et al., 2011), surface layer physics and planetary boundary layer (MYNN, Nakanishi and Niino, 2009;  Olson et al., 2019). Initial and boundary conditions were obtained from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts Interim Reanalysis (ERA Interim) (Dee et al., 2011). WRF was initialized on 1 July 00UTC of a given year and integrated continuously until 1 September 00UTC of the following year and repeated for 32 yr. Sea surface temperature (SST) from ERA Interim was updated every 6 h. Grid nudging was applied in all model levels of the 27 km grid (nudging coefficient 0.0003 s−1) so that WRF was forced to follow large-scale features from the reanalysis.

Additional details can be found in the associate manuscript.

 

Usage notes

Data can be accessed with any software capable of processing NetCDF format files. Examples include:

-- python and wrf-python https://wrf-python.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

-- Interactive Data Language (IDL)

-- Matlab

For more usage notes data, refer to the README.txt file.

Funding

National Science Foundation, Award: ICER 1664173