The Tibetan Plateau (TP) is the highest and most extensive highland in the world, and is widely known as "the Roof of the World", "the World Water Tower" and "the Third Pole". The thermal and mechanical forces of the TP play an essential role in influencing the global climate, and precipitation is one of its most important water-cycle components.
However, accurately simulating precipitation over the TP is a long-standing worldwide challenge. Current state-of-the-art climate models tend to overestimate precipitation over the TP. The wet bias over the TP in current numerical models could be a combined outcome of the model’s dynamical core, inadequate model physical parameterizations and relative coarse model resolution. The deep convection parameterization has been regarded has the largest source of model uncertainty in simulating precipitation.
Due to the rapid development of high performance computing resources, convection-permitting models (CPMs), which with horizontal-grid spacing of less than 5 km are constructed to partially resolve (rather than parameterize) convective heat and moisture transport, and thereby offer a path towards fundamental advances in our understanding of factors influencing clouds and precipitation, have become important tools for climate research.
Read more at Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Image: A glance at Himalayas Mountains, the highest mountains of the Tibetan Plateau (Credit: Qi Zhang (http://photography.zhangqibot.com))