Monday, 6 May 2024: 2:00 PM
Shoreline AB (Hyatt Regency Long Beach)
The representation of clouds, especially in the tropics, remains the biggest uncertainty in contemporary climate modeling. The effects and feedbacks associated with clouds are highly complex and occur on scales ranging from microphysical (e.g. 1mm) to synoptic (1000 km). GCMs and ESMs typically require grid cells on the order of 100km wide, and therefore require so-called cloud parametrizations to account for cloud effects. Members of the largest family of cloud parametrizations for GCMs and ESMs, the so-called Mass-Flux Schemes, typically employ the Quasi-Equilibrium (QE) assumption introduced by Arakawa & Schubert (1974). In the QE assumption, clouds near-instantaneously consume instability to reduce the atmosphere to a stable state. However, the QE assumption has been heavily criticized. One of these criticisms is that QE assumption is itself predicated on a set of assumptions which fail to hold at so-called grey-zone horizontal resolutions of about 10-50km. We explore these assumptions and present some novel ideas for a non-QE Mass-Flux Scheme at such resolutions.
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