The Merits of Ocean Prediction for the Prediction of 2010, 2016, and 2021 Summer Heavy Rainfall Events in Japan

The merits of ocean prediction for heavy rainfall prediction were examined using hindcast experiments for three summer heavy rainfall events in 2010, 2016, and 2021 in Japan. In these events, the rainfall stemmed from Baiu and stationary fronts. The hindcast experiments were conducted using regional atmospheric and coupled models (RUN-ATM and RUN-CPL). The results show that RUN-CPL predicted more accurate rainfall properties than RUN-ATM. RUN-ATM underestimated the accumulated rainfall compared with RUN-CPL, and the underestimation became more significant as the lead time increased. This was due to decreased horizontal vapor transport in the ocean southwest of Japan. Pressure patterns that dominated the vapor transport were different in each case. When an atmospheric model was used, the sea level pressure difference between the Pacific high and Japan was weakened, contributing to weaker vapor transport from the southwest because of the weakened anticyclonic and cyclonic circulations at the region of Pacific high and over Japan. The degraded pressure patterns generated by RUN-ATM stemmed from incorrect latent heat flux response to the sea surface temperature. When air-sea was decoupled in the atmospheric model, the decrease of sea surface temperature by latent heat flux did not occur, so the latent heat flux was overestimated. Also, this caused the decrease in the pressure difference between Pacific high and Japan areas, leading to a weaker moisture transport from the ocean southwest of Japan. The heat budget analysis in the ocean mixed layer suggests that ocean dynamics, especially vertical mixing, contributes to suppress the overestimation of latent heat flux around the Pacific high. It is concluded that heavy rainfall prediction that incorporates appropriate air-sea coupling and ocean prediction provides better results than atmosphere-only model prediction for front-derived heavy rainfall events.