Cumulus Cloud Botany in Large Domains – GWC Mag

Editors’ Highlights are summaries of recent papers by AGU’s journal editors.

Source: Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems

Climate feedbacks from low clouds, including shallow cumulus clouds, are the dominant source of uncertainty in climate models and predictions. These clouds are too small in scale to be resolvable in global climate models, and hence they need to be parameterized. Improved data—both observations and computationally generated data—will be crucial for reducing and quantifying uncertainties in parameterizations.     

Jansson et al. [2023] present an extensive set of large-eddy simulations capturing the behavior of trade-wind shallow cumuli under various environmental conditions. The large simulation domains enable the study of the dynamics and organization of shallow cumuli. They are made available to benefit fundamental research and the development of climate models. These simulations stand to provide valuable dynamical insights and serve as valuable training and validation data for parameterizations in climate models.

Citation: Jansson, F., Janssens, M., Grönqvist, J. H., Siebesma, A. P., Glassmeier, F., Attema, J., et al. (2023). Cloud Botany: Shallow cumulus clouds in an ensemble of idealized large-domain large-eddy simulations of the trades. Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems, 15, e2023MS003796. https://doi.org/10.1029/2023MS003796

—Tapio Schneider, Editor, JAMES

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