Highlights will be written for high-level accomplishments and published journal articles of ASR research. Each ASR principal investigator (PI) is expected to submit at least one highlight per fiscal year.
Research Highlights
Recent Highlights
Cellular organization in marine boundary-layer clouds
22 October 2021
Jensen, Michael
Supported by:
Research area: Cloud Distributions/Characterizations
Marine boundary-layer clouds regularly exhibit two distinct organizations at horizontal scales ranging from 20 to 200 km, termed open and closed cells. The way these clouds organize significantly determines the cloud coverage, and thereby their radiative effects. We use long-term data collected at the Eastern North Atlantic ARM site in [...]
New techniques highlight model-predicted storm growth successes and failures
21 October 2021
Fast, Jerome D
Supported by:
Research area: Cloud Processes
Accurately predicting storms in weather and climate forecasts depends on having realistic representations of the atmospheric processes that grow clouds into large, high-impact storms. However, limited model evaluation adds uncertainty to forecasts of storm growth around the world. This study uses new data sets from a storm-generating hotspot in Argentina [...]
Evolving CO2 rather than SST accelerates GCM convergence by a factor of ten
15 October 2021
Romps, David
Supported by:
Research area: General Circulation and Single Column Models/Parameterizations
An earlier paper (Romps 2020) applied an inverse climate-modeling method to rapidly equilibrate SST and CO2 in limited-area cloud-resolving simulations and proposed a way to extend that inverse method to global climate models. Here, that approach is tested in a global aquaplanet simulation of perpetual equinox and is found to [...]
Energetics of surface melt in West Antarctica
27 September 2021
Lubin, Dan; Vogelmann, Andrew M.
Supported by:
Research area: Radiation Processes
The contribution of West Antarctic mass loss to sea level rise is driven by a complex mechanical and thermodynamic system. While a warming ocean causes a retreat of ice sheets, surface meltwater can further compromise the structural integrity of an ice shelf by filtering through crevasses into its interior mass. [...]
Revisiting the deepening-warming decoupling theory
21 September 2021
Zheng, Youtong
Supported by:
Research area: Cloud Processes
An important but poorly understood phenomenon about the stratocumulus (low-lying blanket-like clouds) is its tendency to transition to cumulus clouds (cauliflower-like clouds) as the sea surface warms, called the stratocumulus-to-cumulus transition (SCT). The conventional wisdom is that the SCT is primarily driven by the enhanced evaporation of seawater. We revisit [...]