Open AccessComparison of the Vertical Distributions of Cloud Properties from Idealized Extratropical Deep Convection Simulations Using Various Horizontal Resolutions
Author(s) -
Wei Huang,
JianWen Bao,
Xu Zhang,
Baode Chen
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
monthly weather review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.862
H-Index - 179
eISSN - 1520-0493
pISSN - 0027-0644
DOI - 10.1175/mwr-d-17-0162.1
Subject(s) - extratropical cyclone , convection , weather research and forecasting model , meteorology , mass flux , environmental science , supercell , large eddy simulation , atmospheric sciences , mechanics , storm , geology , physics , turbulence
The authors coarse-grained and analyzed the output from a large-eddy simulation (LES) of an idealized extratropical supercell storm using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model with various horizontal resolutions (200 m, 400 m, 1 km, and 3 km). The coarse-grained physical properties of the simulated convection were compared with explicit WRF simulations of the same storm at the same resolution of coarse-graining. The differences between the explicit simulations and the coarse-grained LES output increased as the horizontal grid spacing in the explicit simulation coarsened. The vertical transport of the moist static energy and total hydrometeor mixing ratio in the explicit simulations converged to the LES solution at the 200-m grid spacing. Based on the analysis of the coarse-grained subgrid vertical flux of the moist static energy, the authors confirmed that the nondimensional subgrid vertical flux of the moist static energy varied with the subgrid fractional cloudiness according to a function of fractional cloudiness, regardless of the box size. The subgrid mass flux could not account for most of the total subgrid vertical flux of the moist static energy because the eddy-transport component associated with the internal structural inhomogeneity of convective clouds was of a comparable magnitude. This study highlights the ongoing challenge in developing scale-aware parameterizations of subgrid convection.