Breakout Summary Report
ARM/ASR User and PI Meeting
13 - 17 March 2017
14 March 2017
1:30 PM - 2:30 PM
100
Robert Wood and Yunyan Zhang
Breakout Description
The Warm Boundary-Layer Processes working group focuses upon understanding and improving the model representation of processes controlling the structural and radiative properties of clouds, aerosols, and their interactions in the lowest few kilometers of the atmosphere. The boundary layer is shaped by radiative, turbulent, and chemical interactions with the Earth's surface and with the overlying free troposphere. The Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility has made major recent investments in measurement sites (both fixed and mobile) to provide new observations to help understand warm boundary-layer processes, including improved characterization of underlying land-surface properties, boundary-layer and cloud dynamics, cloud and aerosol microphysics and their interactions, and radiative processes that together influence the vertical transfers of energy, moisture, and atmospheric constituents. The Warm Boundary-Layer Processes working group is tasked with using these new observations together with new modeling approaches to improve the representation of boundary-layer structure, processes, and impacts in climate models.
This was the inaugural breakout of the Warm Boundary-Layer Processes working group. The breakout consisted of two 15-minute invited presentations, one focused on planetary boundary-layer (PBL) clouds over land, and the other on the organization of PBL clouds over the ocean. The remaining 30 minutes of the session consisted of one- or two-slide summaries, solicited from working group members, about the work they are doing related to the warm PBL. A total of 18 people contributed slides. This rapid tour of the work related to the warm PBL served to provide attendees with an overview of the various projects focused on this theme.
INVITED PRESENTATIONS
- Larry Berg: Boundary Layer Clouds at the Southern Great Plains: Looking to the Future
- Chris Bretherton: Mesoscale Organization of Shallow Marine Cloud
Main Discussion
With the invited talks and contributed slides, and the limited duration of the breakout (one hour), there was little time for open discussion. Attendees were encouraged to consider possible workshops/meetings that might be proposed for fall.Key Findings
This was the first opportunity for the new Warm Boundary-Layer Processes working group to meet. As part of this, the working group chairs surveyed the range of ARM Climate Research Facility/Atmospheric System Research/U.S. Department of Energy projects (and contacts) that project onto the Warm Boundary-Layer Processes theme. These include:
- Aerosol and Cloud Experiments in the Eastern North Atlantic (ACE-ENA) - Jian Wang
- CAUSES - Cyril Morcrette/Steve Klein/Hsi-Yen Ma
- Climate Model Development and Validation (CMDV) - Chris Bretherton/David Romps/Chris Golaz/Shaocheng Xie/Steve Ghan/Jiwen Fan
- Cross-Scale Land-Atmosphere Experiment (CSLAEX) - Pierre Gentine
- ENA site science - Pavlos Kollias/Mark Miller/Rob Wood
- Enhanced Soundings for Local Coupling Studies - Craig Ferguson/Joe Santanello
- Holistic Interactions of Shallow Clouds, Aerosols, and Land-Ecosystems (HI-SCALE) - Jerome Fast/Larry Berg
- Land-Atmosphere-Cloud Interactions (LACI) - Larry Berg/Margaret Torn/Dave Turner/Yunyan Zhang
- Land-Atmosphere Feedback Experiment (LAFE) - Volker Wulfmeyer/Dave Turner
- LES (Large-Eddy Simulation) ARM Symbiotic Simulation and Observation (LASSO) - Bill Gustafson/Andy Vogelmann
- Layered Atlantic Smoke Interactions with Clouds (LASIC) - Paquita Zuidema
- Marine ARM GPCI Investigation of Clouds (MAGIC) - Ernie Lewis
- Microphysical Simulators for Large-Eddy Simulation - Ann Fridlind
- Radar Simulators - Pavlos Kollias/Shaocheng Xie
- Southern Great Plains Boundary Layer Science - Dave Turner/Steve Klein