The operational JMA nonhydrostatic mesoscale model

An operational nonhydrostatic mesoscale model has been developed by the Numerical Prediction Division (NPD) of the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) in partnership with the Meteorological Research Institute (MRI). The model is based on the MRI/NPD unified nonhydrostatic model (MRI/NPD-NHM), while several modifications have been made for operational numerical weather prediction with a horizontal resolution of 10 km. A fourth-order advection scheme considering staggered grid configuration is implemented. The buoyancy term is directly evaluated from density perturbation. A time-splitting scheme for advection has been developed, where the low-order (second order) part of advection is modified in the latter half of the leapfrog time integration. Physical processes have also been revised, especially in the convective parameterization and PBL schemes. A turbulent kinetic energy (TKE) diagnostic scheme has been developed to overcome problems that arise to predict TKE. The model performance for mesoscale NWP has been verified by comparison with a former operational hydrostatic mesoscale model of JMA. It is found that the new nonhydrostatic mesoscale model outperforms the hydrostatic model in the prediction of synoptic fields and quantitative precipitation forecasts.