Title: Shallow-to-Deep Transition of Continental Moist Convection: Cold Pools, Surface Fluxes, and Mesoscale Organization

Abstract

Large-eddy simulation is used to investigate the effects of cold pools driven by rain evaporation on the shallow-to-deep convection transition over land. The physically consistent methodologies are developed to obtain a time-dependent reference ensemble without cold pools and to apply interactive surface heat fluxes without modeling of surface energy and water budgets. Three different simulation ensembles are contrasted. The reference ensemble, in the spirit of one-dimensional single-column models, eliminates cold pools by horizontally homogenizing negative buoyancy production due to rain evaporation. The additional ensembles complement the reference cold-pool-free ensemble by including cold pools and by applying either interactive or prescribed surface fluxes. Contrasting these ensembles suggests possible improvements of convection parameterization in large-scale models of weather and climate. Without cold pools, the reference ensemble preserves key features of buoyancy-driven cellular convection associated with a field of convective plumes, as assumed in a typical convection parameterization. With cold pools, a significant enhancement of surface heat and moisture fluxes and about an hour delay of their daily maximum is simulated. Cold pools enhance near-surface temperature and moisture standard deviations as well as maxima of the near-surface updraft velocity. They also lead to the reduction of cloud lateral entrainment, deeper vertical development ofmore » the cloud layer, and a few-times-larger accumulated surface precipitation. Interactive surface fluxes provide a damping mechanism that noticeably suppresses all these effects. Perhaps surprisingly, cold pools do not significantly change the cloud-base convective mass flux that approximately follows the evolution of surface heat fluxes.« less

Authors:

Kurowski, Marcin J. ^[1]; Suselj, Kay ^[2]; Grabowski, Wojciech W. ^[3]; Teixeira, Joao ^[2]

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+ Show Author Affiliations

1. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, and Joint Institute for Regional Earth System Science and Engineering, Los Angeles, California
2. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California
3. National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado

Publication Date:

Sat Dec 01 00:00:00 EST 2018

Research Org.:

University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO (United States)

Sponsoring Org.:

USDOE Office of Science (SC), Biological and Environmental Research (BER)

OSTI Identifier:

1481316

Alternate Identifier(s):

OSTI ID: 1612585

Grant/Contract Number:  

SC0016476

Resource Type:

Published Article

Journal Name:

Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences

Additional Journal Information:

Journal Name: Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences Journal Volume: 75 Journal Issue: 12; Journal ID: ISSN 0022-4928

Publisher:

American Meteorological Society

Country of Publication:

United States

Language:

English

Subject:

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES; 37 INORGANIC, ORGANIC, PHYSICAL, AND ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY; meteorology & atmospheric sciences; cold pools; deep convection; surface layer; numerical analysis/modeling