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Updated: Dec 13, 2025

A Protocol for Conducting Rainfall Simulation to Study Soil Runoff
Published on: April 3, 2014
Evaluation of NU-WRF rainfall forecasts for IFloodS
Di Wu1,2, Christa Peters-Lidard3, Wei-Kuo Tao1
1Mesoscale Atmospheric Processes Laboratory, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland.
Abstract:
The Iowa Flood Studies (IFloodS) campaign was conducted in eastern Iowa as a pre-GPM-launch campaign from 1 May to 15 June 2013. During the campaign period, real time forecasts are conducted utilizing NASA-Unified Weather Research and Forecasting (NU-WRF) model to support the everyday weather briefing. In this study, two sets of the NU-WRF rainfall forecasts are evaluated with Stage IV and Multi-Radar Multi-Sensor (MRMS) Quantitative Precipitation Estimation (QPE), with the objective to understand the impact of Land Surface initialization on the predicted precipitation. NU-WRF is also compared with North American Mesoscale Forecast System (NAM) 12 km forecast. In general, NU-WRF did a good job at capturing individual precipitation events. NU-WRF is also able to replicate a better rainfall spatial distribution compare with NAM. Further sensitivity tests show that the high-resolution makes a positive impact on rainfall forecast. The two sets of NU-WRF simulations produce very close rainfall characteristics. The Land surface initialization do not show significant impact on short-term rainfall forecast, and it is largely due to the soil conditions during the field campaign period.
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