High-resolution modeling of the influences of absorbing aerosols on rainfall over northern India and the Himalaya foothills during boreal summer

High elevation and steep topography of Tibetan Plateau and the Himalayas foothills regions are important components of the South Asian summer monsoon system. Strong orographic forcing combined with abundant moisture from the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal and aerosols stacked up against the southern slope of the Tibetan Plateau produce complex physical and dynamical effects on monsoon rainfall and circulation. In this work, we use the NASA Unified Weather Research and Forecasting (Nu-WRF) model to study the effect of aerosol radiative forcing on the short-term predictability (1-7 days) of the South Asian monsoon rainfall system. Two sets of 7-day forecasting experiments were conducted with and without aerosol radiative forcing. Each set consists of 34 7-day forcasts with initial conditions from daily reanalysis and GEOS-5 aerosol distribution (only for aerosol run) from June 11- July 14, 2008. Nu-WRF, without aerosol forcing captures the horizontal distribution of 7-day mean precipitation reasonably well, but it tends to over-estimates rainfall over the central India. The biases are especially larger in the upwind side of the western Ghats and northeast India and Bangladesh. Preliminary results show that inclusion of aerosol radiative forcing and interaction with dynamics reduces rainfall over the Indo-Gangetic plain where aerosol loadinng is high, but enhances rainfall downstream of the prevailing monsoon flow in the southern slope of Tibetan Plateau, especially over the northeast India and foothills regions, consistent with the EHP hypothesis. Effect of aerosol radiative forcing is small during the first two days of forecasts. Rainfall anomalies generated by atmospheric feedback induced by aerosol radiative forcing becomes statistically significant and large enough to be separable from growing model biases after three days of simulation. The results indicate the inclusion of aerosol radiative forcing may improve short-term (4-7 day) forecasting skill in northeastern India.