Climatological features of WRF-simulated tropical cyclones over the western North Pacific

Tropical cyclones (TCs) over the western North Pacific (WNP) are simulated for the 29 TC seasons of July–October from 1982 to 2010 using the regional Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model nested within global WRF model simulations. Averaged over the entire 29-year period, the nested global–regional WRF has reasonably simulated the climatology of key TC features such as the location/frequency of genesis and tracks. The dynamical and thermal structures of the simulated TCs are weaker than observations owing to the coarse spatial resolution of the regional WRF (50 km × 50 km). TC frequencies are somewhat underestimated over the East China Sea but are substantially overestimated over the South China Sea and the Philippine Sea with neighboring oceans between 10°N and 15°N. Categorization of the simulated TCs into six clusters based on the observed TC clusters and the associated large-scale circulation show that the nested simulation depicts the observed TC characteristics well except for two clusters associated with TCs traveling from the Philippine Sea to the East China Sea. Errors in the simulated TC genesis and tracks are mostly related to these two clusters. In the simulation, the monsoon confluent zone over the Philippine Sea is too strong, and the mid-latitude jet stream expands farther south than that in the observations. Overall results from this study suggest that the nested global–regional WRF can be useful for studying the TC climatology over the WNP.