ALBERT

Beschreibung: The Community Atmosphere Biosphere Land Exchange (CABLE) model has been coupled to the UK Met Office Unified Model (UM) within the existing framework of the Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator (ACCESS), replacing the Met Office Surface Exchange Scheme (MOSES). Here we investigate how features of the CABLE model impact on present-day surface climate using ACCESS atmosphere-only simulations. The main differences attributed to CABLE include a warmer winter and a cooler summer in the Northern Hemisphere (NH), earlier NH spring runoff from snowmelt, and smaller seasonal and diurnal temperature ranges. The cooler NH summer temperatures in canopy-covered regions are more consistent with observations and are attributed to two factors. Firstly, CABLE accounts for aerodynamic and radiative interactions between the canopy and the ground below; this placement of the canopy above the ground eliminates the need for a separate bare ground tile in canopy-covered areas. Secondly, CABLE simulates larger evapotranspiration fluxes and a slightly larger daytime cloud cover fraction. Warmer NH winter temperatures result from the parameterization of cold climate processes in CABLE in snow-covered areas. In particular, prognostic snow density increases through the winter and lowers the diurnally resolved snow albedo; variable snow thermal conductivity prevents early winter heat loss but allows more heat to enter the ground as the snow season progresses; liquid precipitation freezing within the snowpack delays the building of the snowpack in autumn and accelerates snow melting in spring. Overall we find that the ACCESS simulation of surface air temperature benefits from the specific representation of the turbulent transport within and just above the canopy in the roughness sublayer as well as the more complex snow scheme in CABLE relative to MOSES.

Beschreibung: Simulations of tropical convection from an operational numerical weather prediction model are evaluated with the focus on the model's ability to simulate the observed high ice water contents associated with the outflow of deep convection and to investigate the modelled processes that control the phase composition of tropical convective clouds. The 1 km horizontal grid length model that uses a single-moment microphysics scheme simulates the intensification and decay of convective strength across the mesoscale convective system. However, deep convection is produced too early, the OLR (outgoing longwave radiation) is underestimated and the areas with reflectivities 〉 30 dBZ are overestimated due to too much rain above the freezing level, stronger updraughts and larger particle sizes in the model. The inclusion of a heterogeneous rain-freezing parameterisation and the use of different ice size distributions show better agreement with the observed reflectivity distributions; however, this simulation still produces a broader profile with many high-reflectivity outliers demonstrating the greater occurrence of convective cells in the simulations. Examining the phase composition shows that the amount of liquid and ice in the modelled convective updraughts is controlled by the following: the size of the ice particles, with larger particles growing more efficiently through riming and producing larger IWC (ice water content); the efficiency of the warm rain process, with greater cloud water contents being available to support larger ice growth rates; and exclusion or limitation of graupel growth, with more mass contained in slower falling snow particles resulting in an increase of in-cloud residence times and more efficient removal of LWC (liquid water content). In this simulated case using a 1 km grid length model, horizontal mass divergence in the mixed-phase regions of convective updraughts is most sensitive to the turbulence formulation. Greater mixing of environmental air into cloudy updraughts in the region of −30 to 0 °C produces more mass divergence indicative of greater entrainment, which generates a larger stratiform rain area. Above these levels in the purely ice region of the simulated updraughts, the convective updraught buoyancy is controlled by the ice particle sizes, demonstrating the importance of the microphysical processes on the convective dynamics in this simulated case study using a single-moment microphysics scheme. The single-moment microphysics scheme in the model is unable to simulate the observed reduction of mean mass-weighted ice diameter as the ice water content increases. The inability of the model to represent the observed variability of the ice size distribution would be improved with the use of a double-moment microphysics scheme.