Simulating the Chesapeake Bay breeze: Sensitivities to water surface temperature

The accuracy of simulations is measured against observed WST, inland wind speed and temperature, and in simulations' ability to detect bay breezes via a detection algorithm developed for numerical model output.

Missing WST data are found to be problematic within the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model framework, especially when activating the prognostic equation for skin temperature, sst_skin. This is alleviated when filling all missing WST values with skin temperature values within the initial and boundary conditions. Performance of bay-breeze prediction is shown to be somewhat associated with the resolution of the WST dataset.