Development of High-Resolution Long-Term Meteorological and Hydrologic Datasets in Taiwan and East Asia

The objective of this study is to develop high-resolution meteorological modeling system and to construct long-term climatologic databases for subsequent investigation on the impacts of regional climate changes on the local scale meteorological characteristics in Taiwan. At the same time, to provide the simulation results for supporting the hazards mitigation plan and assessing the social cost. The proposal has been granted and the project is officially under implementation presently.The main characteristics of the high-resolution meteorological modeling are the refining treatment of the land surface physical processes. Particularly, the land surface hydrologic processes and the variations of soil moisture are the targeting components. The soil moisture is an important variable determining the surface energy budget that affects the short-term weather prediction and long-term climate variations. At the moment, we are undertaking the following tasks: (1) set up the WRF modeling and dynamically downscaling the ECHAM/SIT/TIMCOM Earth System Model (EHTW ESM) re-analysis data to initialize the WRF system; (2) update the soil type classifications to improve the prediction of the soil moisture and near surface meteorological fields; (3) examine the impact of soil moisture initialization process on the land-air exchanging processes.For the upcoming years, the main task is to provide the high resolution atmospheric database into the hydrologic model to assess the runoff processes and the management of the watershed for the future 45 days application. Furthermore, we will integrate the high-resolution land use data that is developed under other sub-project into WRF model system to investigate the impact of the land use changes on local scale meteorological and climate modeling.The results from this study should provide the support on the assessment of the natural hazards mitigation plan and enhance the adaptation capability when facing the natural disaster impact.