Arctic Clouds and Precipitation in the Community Earth System Model Version 2.

The Arctic climate is changing rapidly, warming at about twice the rate of the planet. Global climate models (GCMs) are invaluable tools both for understanding the drivers of these changes and predicting future Arctic climate evolution. While GCMs are continually improving, there remain difficulties in representing cloud processes which occur on scales smaller than GCM resolution.

Reducing the aerosol forcing uncertainty using observational constraints on warm rain processes.

Global climate models (GCMs) disagree with other lines of evidence on the rapid adjustments of cloud cover and liquid water path to anthropogenic aerosols. Attempts to use observations to constrain the parameterizations of cloud processes in GCMs have failed to reduce the disagreement. We propose using observations sensitive to the relevant cloud processes rather than only to the atmospheric state and focusing on process realism in the absence of aerosol perturbations in addition to the process susceptibility to aerosols.

An Observational View of Relationships Between Moisture Aggregation, Cloud, and Radiative Heating Profiles.

Data from several coincident satellite sensors are analyzed to determine the dependence of cloud and precipitation characteristics of tropical regions on the variance in the water vapor field. Increased vapor variance is associated with decreased high cloud fraction and an enhancement of low-level radiative cooling in dry regions of the domain. The result is found across a range of sea surface temperatures and rain rates.

Observing Convective Aggregation.

Convective self-aggregation, the spontaneous organization of initially scattered convection into isolated convective clusters despite spatially homogeneous boundary conditions and forcing, was first recognized and studied in idealized numerical simulations. While there is a rich history of observational work on convective clustering and organization, there have been only a few studies that have analyzed observations to look specifically for processes related to self-aggregation in models. Here we review observational work in both of these categories and motivate the need for more of this work.

Responses of Tropical Ocean Clouds and Precipitation to the Large-Scale Circulation:Atmospheric-Water-Budget-Related Phase Space and Dynamical Regimes.

An atmospheric-water-budget-related phase space is constructed with the tendency terms related to dynamical convergence (QCON ≡ -∇ · ) and moisture advection (QADV ≡ - · ∇) in the water budget equation. Over the tropical oceans, QCON accounts for large-scale dynamical conditions related to conditional instability, and QADV accounts for conditions related to lower-tropospheric moisture gradient. Two reanalysis products [MERRA and ERA-Interim (ERAi)] are used to calculate QCON and QADV.