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Exploring The Convective Grey Zone With Regional Simulations of A Cold Air Outbreak

Abstract

Cold air outbreaks can bring snow to populated areas and can affect aviation safety. Shortcomings in the representation of these phenomena in global and regional models are thought to be associated with large systematic cloud-related radiative flux errors across many models. In this study, nine regional models have been used to simulate a cold air outbreak case at a range of grid spacings (1–16 km) with convection represented explicitly or by a parametrization. Overall, there is more spread between model results for the simulations in which convection is parametrized when compared to simulations in which convection is represented explicitly. The quality of the simulations of both the stratocumulus and the convective regions of the domain are assessed with observational comparisons 24 h into the simulation. The stratocumulus region is not well reproduced by the models, which tend to predict open cell convection with increasing resolution rather than stratocumulus. For the convective region the model spread reduces with increased resolution and there is some improvement in comparison to observations. Comparing models that have the same physical parametrizations or dynamical core suggest that both are important for accurately reproducing this case.

Article / Publication Data
Active/Online
YES
Volume
143
Available Metadata
Accepted On
June 21, 2017
DOI ↗
Early Online Release
June 29, 2017
Fiscal Year
Peer Reviewed
YES
Publication Name
Quarterly Journal of The Royal Meteorological Society
Published On
July 01, 2017
Publisher Name
Royal Meteorological Society
Print Volume
143
Print Number
707
Page Range
2537-2555
Issue
707
Submitted On
November 25, 2016
URL ↗

Authors

Authors who have authored or contributed to this publication.