Evaporative source regions for Australian precipitation from Lagrangian back-trajectory analysis v1.0

Full description

This dataset contains the evaporative sources of moisture supplying precipitation across Australia each day between 1979 and 2013. Evaporative sources were estimated using a Lagrangian back-trajectory approach based on Dirmeyer and Brubaker (1999; Journal of Geophysical Research). Evaporative sources were estimated by tracking all forms of atmospheric water backward through the atmosphere using 3d wind fields and a 10 minute time step. Precipitation falling anywhere on the Australian continent of more than 2mm/day was tracked.

The back-trajectory model was driven by three-hourly, 3d atmospheric fields of wind, temperature, precipitable water and pressure, and 2d fields of precipitation and latent heat flux, produced by a WRFv3.6.1 simulation driven by ERA-Interim reanalysis (Dee D. et al., 2011). The simulation was performed over the CORDEX Australasia region with a spatial horizontal resolution of approximately 50km and 30 vertical levels.

The dataset contains the following variables:

- water vapour contribution of domain grid cells to each cell where it rained

- precipitation at each grid cell where it rained

- x and y index of precipitation in number of cells from [0,0]

The water vapour contribution is dimensioned [gridcell_wvc,i_cross,j_cross] where gridcell_wvc is the record identifier of grid cells where precipitation occurred on that day; i_cross and j_cross are the coordinates of the curvilinear grid.

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