E3SM model evaluation of marine stratocumulus-to-cumulus cloud transition based on the MAGIC observations
Authors
Xue Zheng — Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Stephen Klein — Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Category
Warm low clouds, including aerosol interactions
Description
The long-standing marine boundary layer (MBL) cloud biases in climate models cause a large uncertainty in the net cloud feedback. Therefore, tremendous amount of effort has been made to improve the MBL cloud simulations in climate models. Previous model process-level evaluations guided by ARM observations have identified model parameterization deficiencies related to drizzling MBL cloud in the Community Atmosphere Model (CAM) and the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM). The current study aims to further evaluate the coupling between parameterizations during marine stratocumulus-to-cumulus cloud transition based on ARM observations from the MAGIC field campaign.
We will present the results from a MAGIC case study with E3SM version 1 simulations. We will compare the modeled cloud, drizzle and MBL structure with observations, and explore how to improve the representation of drizzling MBL clouds and the distinction between stratocumulus and cumulus in E3SM.
