Study of convective motions and analysis of the impact of physical parametrization on the WRF-ARW forecast model

Optimizing the physical parametrizations of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model is one of the most challenging and complex tasks. In fact, it is not a simple operation to optimize the performance of a meteorological model capable of forecasting meteorological events, even extreme ones, in complex orographic areas such as that of Sicily. In this reference framework, the research activity of the group of meteorology and environmental modeling, established at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Sciences, Physical Sciences and Earth Sciences (MIFT) of the University of Messina, focuses on the development of a physical-mathematical model for the meteorological forecast. The WRF prediction model is evaluated on the ability to predict the development and evolution of a thunderstorm cell. After the definition of the domain under study and the choice of spatial resolution to be used, it was proceeded to the optimization of the physical parametrizations. In particular, in this paper, the performance improvements of the WRF model were evaluated, obtained by optimizing the convective parametrizations. As a case study, the meteorological event recorded in Sicily on 9 June 2016 was examined.