Breakout Summary Report
ARM/ASR User and PI Meeting
13 - 17 March 2017
Convective Processes Working Group
14 March 2017
2:30 PM - 3:30 PM
130
Adam Varble and Tony Del Genio
14 March 2017
2:30 PM - 3:30 PM
130
Adam Varble and Tony Del Genio
Breakout Description
This breakout introduced the ARM and ASR community to the newly formed Convective Processes Working Group.Main Discussion
We first presented an overview of the preliminary group description, mission, objectives, and research themes. These were presented as being open to change based on input from the session attendees, specifically the group research themes, which consist of vertical velocity, convective system transitions, and parameterization development. Before getting feedback from the attendees, 12 2-minute, 1-slide presentations were given by ASR investigators (Scott Collis, Fleur Couvreux, Jiwen Fan, Ann Fridlind, Virendra Ghate, Samson Hagos, Christian Jakob, Zhanqing Li, Hugh Morrison, Courtney Schumacher, Jeff Trapp, and Christopher Williams) working on research relevant to the group. These presentations highlighted that overlap in individual research projects is ongoing in the group, although there is generally somewhat limited collaboration between projects toward larger group and programmatic objectives.Following the short presentations, the rest of the session was set aside for discussion of the group description and themes. Group challenges were also discussed, specifically connecting the modeling community and ACME developers to ARM data, using the supersite continuous modeling strategy to benefit deep convection science, and improving communication and cooperation between meteorological and cloud-aerosol interaction communities studying convection, although feedback from attendees was generally limited, perhaps because of limited time.
In response to the continuous modeling strategy starting to be employed by ARM, attendees mentioned that continuous cloud-resolving models (e.g., HRRR) are currently being run over areas such as the CONUS. Currently, these are not taken advantage of by the ASR community, nor are advanced data assimilation techniques with the use of ARM data.
Others mentioned that subgroups should form around common tools, data sets, and “fun” science because these naturally bring researchers together anyway. Therefore, these commonalities need to be identified, perhaps in a workshop. Subgroups are not only critical for making progress on larger programmatic goals, but attendees mentioned that they are also very helpful when advocating for ARM measurements and measurement strategies that can benefit individual PI projects.
Issues
We fell short on time to make sufficient progress on addressing group challenges or getting people to come together around specific research themes that could nucleate subgroups. Hopefully, progress can be made before the next meeting using a group mailing list to communicate beforehand. At some point, a separate working group meeting may be needed to make tangible progress on addressing group challenges and forming subgroups.The only subgroup discussed was the Aerosol Deep Convection Interactions (ADCI) subgroup formed in the old CAPI Working Group, who have a white paper that they would like to follow through with; however, this subgroup lacks expertise in deep convective meteorology, which should be included to avoid past rifts in the community and previous issues accounting for meteorological correlations with aerosol properties. Whether experts will step forward to join this group is still unclear.
It should be noted, however, that a separate breakout session on deep convective transitions was held later in the week, and the attendees of that session appeared to be highly motivated. If that subgroup develops further, it will naturally be part of the overall Convective Processes effort within ASR-ARM.
Needs
A bit more time for the session, say 1.5 hours rather than 1 hour, would allow for more in-depth discussion and progress on group challenges.Getting the group mailing list set up as soon as possible is very important.