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Multiscale Cloud System ModelingThe central theme of this paper is to describe how cloud system resolving models (CRMs) of grid spacing approximately 1 km have been applied to various important problems in atmospheric science across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales and how these applications relate to other modeling approaches. A long-standing problem concerns the representation of organized precipitating convective cloud systems in weather and climate models. Since CRMs resolve the mesoscale to large scales of motion (i.e., 10 km to global) they explicitly address the cloud system problem. By explicitly representing organized convection, CRMs bypass restrictive assumptions associated with convective parameterization such as the scale gap between cumulus and large-scale motion. Dynamical models provide insight into the physical mechanisms involved with scale interaction and convective organization. Multiscale CRMs simulate convective cloud systems in computational domains up to global and have been applied in place of contemporary convective parameterizations in global models. Multiscale CRMs pose a new challenge for model validation, which is met in an integrated approach involving CRMs, operational prediction systems, observational measurements, and dynamical models in a new international project: the Year of Tropical Convection, which has an emphasis on organized tropical convection and its global effects.
Document ID
20110008164
Acquisition Source
Goddard Space Flight Center
Document Type
Reprint (Version printed in journal)
External Source(s)
Authors
Tao, Wei-Kuo
(NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Greenbelt, MD, United States)
Moncrieff, Mitchell W.
(National Center for Atmospheric Research Boulder, CO, United States)
Date Acquired
August 25, 2013
Publication Date
November 1, 2009
Publication Information
Publication: Reviews of Geophysics
Publisher: American Geophysical Union
Volume: 47
ISSN: 8755-1209
Subject Category
Meteorology And Climatology
Report/Patent Number
Paper 2008R0000276
Distribution Limits
Public
Copyright
Other

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