What can a regional climate model tell us about the long term climatology of marine stratocumulus off California's coast?

In order to investigate the present and future role of stratocumulus in the climatology of coastal California, we have coupled a cloud-topped boundary layer model to a regional climate model (RCM). Using this newly coupled model, we performed a multi-decadal simulation of the climatology of the northeast Pacific and Western North America. We show the impact of stratocumulus within the model (stratocumulus are essentially non-existent in the original RCM), we validate the new RCM at multiple timescales against a variety of observational data sets, and we discuss trends in the climatology of marine stratocumulus over the length of our study. Additionally, we show results from a year-long simulation of the southeast Pacific. We discuss our results in the context of a similar study that used the University of Hawaii RCM.