Environmental & Climate Sciences Department Seminar

Realistic representation of cloud microphysical processes is of vital importance to the simulation of climate and weather in atmospheric model. In this talk, I am going to talk about my model development work in climate and regional models, especially with emphasis on the microphysical processes which consists of: 1) Developing a novel cloud microphysical scheme in the CESM-CAM5 aiming at improving the representation of ice-phase cloud process. Different from conventional microphysics schemes separating cloud ice from snow, a single prognostic category is used to represent the whole spectrum of solid hydrometeors in this scheme. Instead of using fixed physical properties for separate ice classes, e.g., the mass, area, and fall velocity, we consider the particle shape and riming impacts on ice properties. This scheme is notable for its improved representation of cloud and cloud radiative forcing with reduced the computational time in global simulation; 2) Optimizing physical process of the single-moment SBU_YLIN scheme aiming at improving convection simulation, and further developing it into a double-moment scheme and coupling it with WRF-Chem model in WRF model. The double-moment scheme is notable for its significant improvement in squall line simulation.