Tuesday, 30 April 2002: 11:15 AM
Towards a wavelet-based convective representation for GCM: rationales and preliminary results
In spite of its widely recognized importance, little progress has been
achieved for the cumulus parameterization in last decades. Although the
cloud-resolving model (CRM) is nowadays widely accepted as a useful
tool to verify these parameterizations, it has so far failed to play a
more active role of critically diagnosing the formulation for the
latters, in spite of the fact that CRMs are capable of simulating
three-dimensional convective systems reasonably. One of the problems
is traced to the mass-flux formulation widely used for cumulus
parameterizations, which decomposes a convective system into an
ensemble of sign-definite up- and down-drafts. However, it is not
straightforward to decompose an actual realization from a CRM
experiment into an ensemble such sign-definite drafts, because such a
decomposition is not unique mathematically due the lack of
admissibility (a mathematically requirement posed on any orthogonal
complete function sets). The wavelets have been proposed (Yano et
al. 2001a, b, JAS) as an alternative method to diagnose outputs from
CRM simulations in order to objectively characterize the convective
system. In the present talk, we further propose the wavelets as a
diagnostic tool in order to construct a convective representation (no
longer called 'parameterization', because the convective elements are
more explicitly considered in this approach) in a more logical manner
through such objective diagnoses. Some preliminary analyses towards
this goal will be presented, which include tests for the capacity
(compressibility) for efficient representation of convective systems
by wavelets, and the wavelet representation of the vertical heat and
moisture fluxes.
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