Aviation Model: A Fine-Scale Numerical Weather Prediction System for Aviation Applications at the Hong Kong International Airport

摘要

The Hong Kong Observatory (HKO) is planning to implement a fine-resolution NumericalWeather Prediction (NWP) model for supporting the aviation weather applications at theHong Kong International Airport (HKIA). This new NWPmodel system, called Aviation Model (AVM), is configured at a horizontal grid spacing of 600m and 200m. It is based on the WRF-ARW (Advance Research WRF) model that can have sufficient computation efficiency in order to produce hourly updated forecasts up to 9 hours ahead on a future high performance computer system with theoretical peak performance of around 10 TFLOPS.AVMwill be nested inside the operational mesoscaleNWPmodel ofHKOwith horizontal resolution of 2 km. In this paper, initial numerical experiment results in forecast of windshear events due to seabreeze and terrain effect are discussed. The simulation of sea-breeze-related windshear is quite successful, and the headwind change observed fromflight data could be reproduced in the model forecast. Some impacts of physical processes on generating the fine-scalewind circulation and development of significant convection are illustrated. The paper also discusses the limitations in the current model setup and proposes methods for the future development of AVM.