Model intercomparison of medicane Ianos using ten mesoscale numerical frameworks

The dataset provides numerical simulations of the high-impact medicane Ianos of September 2020. It is based on a collective effort with five mesoscale models to look for a robust response among ten numerical frameworks used in the community involved in the networking activity of the EU COST Action "MedCyclones" https://medcyclones.eu/

The five mesoscale models are:

The BOLAM hydrostatic model and the MOLOCH non-hydrostatic, fully compressible model developed at CNR-ISAC available upon request to [e-mail]

The Met Office Unified Model (MetUM) available for use under a closed licence agreement, further information at http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/modelling-systems/unified-model

The Meso-NH mesoscale non-hydrostatic model of the French research community freely available under CeCILL-C license agreement on http://mesonh.aero.obs-mip.fr with two variants included: 

one run at Centre National de Recherches Météorologiques (MESONH-CNRM)

one run at Laboratoire d’Aérologie (MESONH-LAERO)

The WRF (Weather Research and Forecasting) non-hydrostatic, fully compressible model freely available at https://github.com/wrf-model/WRF/releases with five variants included:

one run at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (WRF-AUTH)

two run at CNR-ISAC (WRF-ISAC and WRF-ISAC-2)

one run at the National Observatory of Athens (WRF-NOA)

one run at the University of the Balearic Islands (WRF-UIB)

Four sets of simulations are provided:

Control simulations obtained by initialising the models at 00 UTC on 15 September 2020 and using 6-h operational analyses from the Integrated Forecasting System (IFS) of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) as initial and lateral boundary conditions. The horizontal grid spacing is set to 10 km, which approximately matches the resolution of IFS analyses and requires parameterization of deep convection.

A first sensitivity test obtained by initialising the models 12 h earlier at 12 UTC on 14 September 2020.

A second sensitivity test obtained by using ECMWF Reanalysis v5 (ERA5), which provides higher frequency (hourly) but lower spatial resolution (about 30 km), as initial and lateral boundary conditions.

A third sensitivity test obtained by setting the horizontal grid spacing to 2 km, which allows explicit representation of deep convection.

The model output is stored every 3 h until 00 UTC 20 September 2020 and interpolated onto the same regular 0.1°×0.1° horizontal grid and pressure levels. The data files are formatted in Network Common Data Form (NetCDF) and named runs_ILBC_DDHH_RES.nc where

ILBC describes the initial and lateral boundary conditions (IFS or ERA5) 

DDHH describes the initial day and hour (1500 or 1412) 

RES describes the horizontal grid spacing (10 or 2 km)

simulated infrared brightness temperatures are provided in extra files with RTTOV suffix for five of the models and variants