Environmental & Climate Sciences Department Seminar

"Identifying Environmental Controls on Tropical Sea Breeze Convection Using Statistical Emulation"

Presented by Jungmin "Minnie" Park, Colorado State University

Friday, June 12, 2020, 11:00 am — Blue Jeans

Sea breeze circulations are one of the ubiquitous mesoscale flow regimes in coastal areas, where nearly half of the world's population resides. The leading edge of these thermally driven circulations presents as a boundary layer forcing mechanism for convective initiation. Despite the far-reaching impacts of sea breezes, numerical forecasting of sea breeze convection is still challenging due to uncertainties in the initial conditions, as well as the covariance and interaction of multiple meteorological and surface parameters. Due to the computational expense of cloud-resolving models, the sensitivity of sea breeze convection to a variety of environmental parameters has primarily been studied by perturbing one or two parameters at a time. Therefore, the overarching goal of this study is to extend these previous studies by quantifying the relative importance of a suite of environmental parameters, including meteorological properties, land surface characteristics, and aerosol loading, on the continental convection within tropical sea breeze regimes. The key parameters impacting the intensity of the convection within the tropical sea breeze regime have been identified through the application of Gaussian process emulation and variance based sensitivity analysis techniques. An ensemble of 130 initial conditions for tropical sea breeze simulations has been designed by simultaneously perturbing six atmospheric and four surface properties to address this goal. Using the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (RAMS) coupled to a two-way interactive land surface parameterization, 130 pairs for a total of 260 tropical sea breeze simulations have been performed in low- and high-aerosol loading conditions. We find that sea breeze convective intensity is dominated by inversion strength for shallower clouds and boundary layer potential temperature for deeper clouds. In high aerosol loading conditions, the relative contribution of parameters to

Hosted by: Allison McComiskey

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