Evaluating the Representation and Impact of Convective Processes in the NCAR's Community Climate System Model

Download or read book Evaluating the Representation and Impact of Convective Processes in the NCAR's Community Climate System Model written by and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Convection and clouds affect atmospheric temperature, moisture and wind fields through the heat of condensation and evaporation and through redistributions of heat, moisture and momentum. Individual clouds have a spatial scale of less than 10 km, much smaller than the grid size of several hundred kilometers used in climate models. Therefore the effects of clouds must be approximated in terms of variables that the model can resolve. Deriving such formulations for convection and clouds has been a major challenge for the climate modeling community due to the lack of observations of cloud and microphysical properties. The objective of our DOE CCPP project is to evaluate and improve the representation of convection schemes developed by PIs in the NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research) Community Climate System Model (CCSM) and study its impact on global climate simulations.