P2.32
What can a regional climate model tell us about the long term climatology of marine stratocumulus off California's coast?
Travs Allen O'Brien, University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA; and L. C. Sloan and P. Y. Chuang
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.
Poster Session 2, Cloud Physics Poster Session II
Wednesday, 30 June 2010, 5:30 PM-8:30 PM, Exhibit Hall
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