Simulating the microphysical properties of orographic clouds in SNOWIE

Numerical models are useful tools to understand the mechanisms of and quantitatively assess the cloud seeding impacts on clouds and precipitation when the dynamics, microphysics and properties of the natural clouds can be faithfully reproduced. During the Seeded and Natural Orographic Wintertime clouds: the Idaho Experiment (SNOWIE) field campaign, different types of orographic clouds were observed. There are clouds with two or more layers, single layer clouds with almost just supercooled liquid water, clouds with waves and ice generating cells, and clouds with embedded convection. The observational evidence of seeding singles is apparent in some cloud types and is not obvious in some other types. In order to understand the natural precipitation processes and seeding impacts on these cloud types, efforts have been made to reproduce the observed features of these natural clouds by real case WRF simulations. This work presents comparisons of the simulated and observed microphysical properties from several IOPS during the SNOWIE campaign and tries to demonstrate that careful design and configurations of the simulations have to be taken to get reasonable agreements with observations.