Climatology of Sundowner Winds in Coastal Santa Barbara, California, Based on 30 yr High Resolution WRF Downscaling

Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model version 4.0.1 was used to produce a 32 yr high-resolution (1km horizontal grid spacing and hourly resolution) downscaling climatology over Santa Barbara County.

Data in this repository contain surface meteorological variables from WRF downscaling simulations during a series of Sundowner wind events. The list of events is: 
-- Painted Cave Fire 1990: 26-June, 27-June, 28-June
-- Tea Fire 2008: 13-November, 14-November
-- 2004: 24-April, 27-April, 28-April, 2-May, 3-May
-- Jesusita Fire 2009: 5-May, 6-May, 7-May, 8-May, 
-- Sherpa Fire 2016: 15-June, 16-June
-- Whittier Fire 2017: 6-July, 8-July
-- 2017: 11-March, 12-March

Users interested in accessing the entire 32-year WRF downscaling dataset, please contact: Charles Jones at [e-mail]

Methods
WRF model version 4.0.1 was used to produce a 32 yr high-resolution downscaling climatology over Santa Barbara County. WRF was configured with 4 two-way nested grids with 27 km, 9 km, 3 km and 1 km horizontal grid spacings. WRF was configured with 55 vertical levels and model top at 50 hPa. The configuration used numerical parameterizations for microphysics (Single moment 6-class, Hong and Lim, 2006), long-wave and short-wave radiation transfer (RRTMG, Iacono et al., 2008), Noah multi-parameterization options (Noah-MP) (Niu et al., 2011), surface layer physics and planetary boundary layer (MYNN, Nakanishi and Niino, 2009;  Olson et al., 2019). Initial and boundary conditions were obtained from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts Interim Reanalysis (ERA Interim) (Dee et al., 2011). WRF was initialized on 1 July 00UTC of a given year and integrated continuously until 1 September 00UTC of the following year and repeated for 32 yr. Sea surface temperature (SST) from ERA Interim was updated every 6 h. Grid nudging was applied in all model levels of the 27 km grid (nudging coefficient 0.0003 s−1) so that WRF was forced to follow large-scale features from the reanalysis.

Additional details can be found in the associate manuscript.