DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.13844181
title: Seefeld Cold-Air Pool Experiment (SEECAP): WRF Simulation Output without snow cover January 16 2020 0000 UTC to January 17 2020 1200 UTC

description: The Seefeld Cold-Air Pool Experiment (SEECAP) focused on the cross-country skiing area Olympiaregion Seefeld and in particular the topographic setting in the Nordic ski arena which favors the formation of cold-air pools and took place between December 2019 and March 2020. The measurement data are described in Rudolph (2022) and Rauchöcker et al. (2024d) and meteorological measurement data associated with SEECAP are published in Rauchöcker et al. (2024c). This upload contains WRF simulation output data for the night between January 16 and January 17 2020 without snow cover and the plotting routines to reproduce the figures in Rauchöcker et al. (2024d). The night between January 16 and January 17 2020 initially featured an ideal cold-air pool formation followed by a interuption by a wind disturbance around midnight. Simulation output for the same night, but with snow cover is also available (Rauchöcker et al., 2024a). The temperature evolution of the measurements agreed much better with the simulation with snow cover and otherwise the same model setting compared to the simulation without snow cover (Rauchöcker et al. 2024d). Also available in a different dataset is output from a simulation with snow cover for the night between January 12 and January 13 2020 (Rauchöcker et al., 2024b), which featured an undisturbed cold-air pool for almost the entire night. This case was considered to feature in Rauchöcker et al. (2024d), but a different case was chosen because some measurement data was not available during this period.

WRF Simulation Output

This Dataset includes data generated with WRFlux v1.4.1 (Göbel et al.,  2022), a fork of the Weather Research and Forecasting model WRF (Skamarock et al. 2021).  WRFlux allows to calculate the contribution of different processes to the potential temperature tendency at each grid point. The data published here is from the innermost simulation domain with 40m horizontal resolution and 10m vertical resolution close to the surface. The simulations were initialized at 00:00 UTC January 16 2020 and run until 12:00 UTC January 17 2020.

Three different simulations were performed: two simulations with modified snow cover as described in Rauchöcker (2022), one each with the MYNN 2.5-order and the SMS-3DTKE PBL parameterizations (a scheme that blends a PBL scheme and a LES subgrid parameteriztion in the greyzone of turbulence), and one without snow cover with the MYNN 2.5-order PBL parameterization. Otherwise the simulations were identical. This dataset includes the simulation without snow cover. A detailed description of the model setup can be found in Rauchöcker et al (2024d) and in the file namelist.input that was used to generate the simulation results.

Standard WRF output can be found in wrfout_40m_jan16_nosnow. The mean wind speed components, which were necessary to rotate the tendencies in a coordinate system that is aligned with the valley orientation, are contained in windout_40m_jan16_nosnow. These variables were contained in the  unprocessed output files produced by WRFlux; the full files were unfortunately too large to be included here. The postprocessed tendencies are stored in tend_40m_jan16_nosnow.nc.