March 1, 2018
Journal Article

An Evaluation of Marine Boundary Layer Cloud Property Simulations in Community Atmosphere Model Using Satellite Observations: Conventional Sub-grid Parameterizations vs. CLUBB

Abstract

This paper presents a two-step evaluation of the marine boundary layer (MBL) cloud properties from two Community Atmospheric Model (version 5.3, CAM5) simulations, one based on the CAM5 standard parameterization schemes (CAM5-Base), and the other on the Cloud Layers Unified By Binormals (CLUBB) scheme (CAM5-CLUBB). In the first step, we compare the cloud properties directly from model outputs between the two simulations. We find that the CAM5-CLUBB run produces more MBL clouds in the tropical and subtropical large-scale descending regions. Moreover, the stratocumulus (Sc) to cumulus (Cu) cloud regime transition is much smoother in CAM5-CLUBB than in CAM5-Base. In addition, in CAM5-Base we find some grid cells with very small low cloud fraction (

Revised: March 21, 2018 | Published: March 1, 2018

Citation

Song H., Z. Zhang, P. Ma, S.J. Ghan, and M. Wang. 2018. An Evaluation of Marine Boundary Layer Cloud Property Simulations in Community Atmosphere Model Using Satellite Observations: Conventional Sub-grid Parameterizations vs. CLUBB. Journal of Climate 31, no. 6:2299-2320. PNNL-SA-125816. doi:10.1175/JCLI-D-17-0277.1