The impact of vertical grid-nesting on the tropical cyclone intensity and track forecast was investigated using the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) version 3.8 and the initialization method of the Structure Adjustable Balanced Bogus Vortex (SABV). For a better resolution in the central part of the numerical domain, where the tropical cyclone of interest is located, a horizontal and vertical nesting technique was employed. Simulations of the tropical cyclone Sanba (16th in 2012) indicated that the vertical nesting had a weak impact on the cyclone intensity and little impact on the track forecast. Further experiments revealed that the performance of forecast was quite sensitive to the horizontal resolution, which is in agreement with previous studies. The improvement is due to the fact that horizontal resolution can improve forecasts not only on the tropical cyclone-scale but also for large-scale disturbances.

Effect of the nonuniform grid on the two-dimensional transport equation was investigated in terms of theoretical analysis and finite difference method (FDM). The nonuniform grid having a typical structure of the numerical weather forecast model was incorporated in the vertical direction, while the uniform grid was used in the zonal direction. The staggered and non-staggered grid were placed in the vertical and zonal direction, respectively. Time stepping was performed with the third-order Runge Kutta scheme. An error analysis of the spatial discretization on the nonuniform grid was carried out, which indicated that the combined effect of the nonuniform grid and advection velocity produced either numerical diffusion or numerical adverse-diffusion. An analytic function is used for the quantitative evaluation of the errors associated with the discretized transport equation. Numerical experiments with the non-uniformity of vertical grid were found to support the analysis.