The Continental-Scale Soil-Moisture Precipitation Feedback in Europe with Parameterized and Explicit Convection

Abstract Soil moisture atmosphere interactions are key elements of the regional climate system. There is a well-founded hope that more accurate representation soil moisture-precipitation feedback would improve simulation summer precipitation on daily to seasonal, time scales. However, uncertainties have persistently remained as simulated strongly sensitive model deep convection. Here we assess using GPU-accelerated version COSMO. We simulate and compare impact continental-scale springtime soil-moisture anomalies at convection-resolving (2.2 km) convection-parameterizing resolution (12 km). conduct re-analysis-driven simulations 10 seasons (1999-2008) in continental Europe. While both qualitatively agree positive sign moisture-induced precipitation, they differ frequency: When convection parameterized, wetter predominantly leads frequent events, when treated explicitly, primarily become intense. The results indicate sensitivity stronger with parameterized convection, suggesting land surface-atmosphere coupling may be overestimated. In addition, feedback’s complex terrain assessed for perturbations different horizontal confirm negative sub-continental anomalies, which manifests itself local decrease wet-hour frequency. intensity reinforces events same (positive feedback). two processes represented differently explicit explaining much difference between simulations.