2012 Volume 90B Pages 91-102
This study assesses ocean surface winds in regional climate models (RCMs) and evaluates the ability of RCMs to downscale the features of tropical cyclones (TCs). RCMs show a smaller bias in the mean ocean surface wind around Japan during summer than the reanalysis data that is used as boundary data because of the better representation of land/ocean contrast in RCMs. However, for extreme values of ocean surface winds, all RCMs show a large bias over the ocean south of Japan.
The RCMs reasonably simulate the TC tracks for about 40% of TCs, whereas these models fail to simulate realistic TC tracks for the remaining TCs. The TC track errors in the RCMs spread over a wide range with peaks ranging from 100 to 200 km. Although two RCMs underestimate the surface wind speed associated with TCs, one RCM simulates it reasonably. Therefore, it is suggested that the bias in the extreme values of ocean surface winds can be caused not only by an insufficient representation of surface winds associated with a model TC but also by the model TC track errors. Moreover, these errors may affect the extreme values of precipitation produced by the interaction between TCs and topographies in Japan; therefore the extreme values should be used with caution. Multi-model ensemble approach contributes to reduce TC track errors. As a result, number of the TCs with the relatively small TC track errors increases up to about 60%.
