Toward Closing the Water Cycle over the ARM/CART Region: Implementation of Stable Water Isotope Physics in MM5

To date, atmospheric water isotope modeling has been performed on a global scale. The development of a stable water isotope scheme in a mesoscale model will lead to a simulated spatial distribution that will improve our understanding of present day climate variability, as well as historical climate patterns. The purpose of this study was to add water isotope tracers to the regional atmospheric model MM5 (NCAR's Mesoscale Model 5) in order to link existing global and basin-scale isotope models, and to work toward an improved knowledge of the water budget over the ARM site. In order to include isotopic processes in MM5, eight new prognostic variables were added to the model's dynamical core. These are the isotopic mixing ratios for water vapor, cloud liquid water, cloud ice, and rain for the stable isotopes O18 and deuterium. The isotopes are treated in a manner similar to the natural water vapor, cloud liquid water, etc. in terms of diffusion, advection, nudging, and filtering. Isotope fractionation and diffusion are handled using the approach of Gedzelman and Arnold (1994). Processes treated in this model are fractionation during deposition of water vapor onto cloud ice and condensation of water vapor onto cloud water, and also diffusive exchange of isotopes between vapor and falling rain drops. The bulk flux model of Hoffman et al. (1998) is used here as a first order approximation for isotopic evaporative processes. For the runs to be discussed here, lateral boundary conditions were generated by the Melbourne University General Circulation Model. This GCM runs at a resolution of R21, and predicts values of the O18 and deuterium mixing ratios at each grid point. Results of preliminary model runs will be discussed.