The purpose of this thesis is to evaluate the downscaling ability of one-way nesting regional climate models (RCM). To do this, a rigorous and well-defined experiment for assessing the reliability of the one-way nesting approach is developed. This experiment, baptised the Big-Brother Experiment (BBE), is used for addressing some important one-way nesting issues. / The first part of this work is dedicated to the development of a scale decomposition tool employed for the BBE. This tool involves a new spectral analysing technique suitable for two-dimensional fields on limited-area domains, and is based on the discrete cosine transform (DCT). It is used for degrading the spatial resolution of the lateral boundary conditions (LBC) used to drive the Canadian RCM (CRCM), for extracting mesoscale features from the atmospheric fields, and for regional validation, and producing power spectra. / The second part of the thesis describes the BBE framework and its first results. The BBE consists in first establishing a reference virtual-reality climate from an RCM simulation using a large and high-resolution domain. This simulation is called the "Big Brother". This big-brother simulation is then degraded toward the resolution of today's global objective analyses (OA) and/or global climate models (GCM) by removing the short scales. The resulting fields are then used as nesting data to drive an RCM (called the "Little Brother") which is integrated at the same high-resolution as the Big Brother, but over a sub-area of the big-brother domain. The climate statistics of the Little Brother are then compared with those of the big-brother simulation over the little-brother domain. Differences between the two climates can thus be unambiguously attributed to errors associated with the dynamical downscaling technique, and not to model errors nor to observation limitations. The results for a February simulation shows that the Canadian RCM, using a factor of 6 between the model and the LBC spatial resolution, and an update interval of 3 hours, is capable to pass the BBE test; thus showing the reliability of the one-way nesting approach. / In the third and last part of the thesis, the BBE is used to investigate the sensitivity of an RCM to the spatial resolution and temporal update frequency of the LBC. It is shown that spatial resolution jumps of 12, and an update frequency between twice a day (every 12 hours) and four times a day (every 6 hours), are the limits for which a 45-km RCM yields acceptable results.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.38178 |
| Date | January 2002 |
| Creators | Denis, Bertrand. |
| Contributors | Laprise, Rene (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001872799, proquestno: NQ78674, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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