What Drives the Life Cycle of Tropical Anvil Clouds?
Abstract
The net radiative effects of tropical clouds are determined by the evolution of thick, freshly detrained anvil clouds into thin anvil clouds. Thick anvil clouds reduce Earth's energy balance and cool the climate, while thin anvil clouds warm the climate. To determine role of these clouds in climate change we need to understand how interactions of their micro- and macrophysical properties control their radiative properties. We explore anvil cloud evolution using a cloud resolving model in three simulation setups of increasing complexity to disentangle the impacts of the various components of diabatic heating and their interaction with cloud-scale motions.The first phase of evolution and rapid cloud spreading is dominated by latent heating within convective updrafts. After the convective detrainment stops, most of the spreading and thinning of the anvil cloud is driven by cloud radiative processes and latent heating. The combination of radiative cooling at cloud top, latent cooling due to sublimation at cloud base, latent heating due to deposition and radiative heating in between leads to a sandwich-like, cooling-heating-cooling structure. The heating sandwich promotes the development of two within-anvil convective layers and a double cell circulation, dominated by strong outflow at 12 km altitude with in flow above andmore »
- Authors:
-
[1];
[1];
[1];
[2];
[2]
- University of Washington Seattle WA USA
- Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Richland WA USA
- Publication Date:
- Research Org.:
- Pacific Northwest National Lab. (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States)
- Sponsoring Org.:
- USDOE; Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF); National Science Foundation (NSF)
- OSTI Identifier:
- 1567937
- Alternate Identifier(s):
- OSTI ID: 1567940; OSTI ID: 1770157
- Report Number(s):
- PNNL-SA-145805
Journal ID: ISSN 1942-2466
- Grant/Contract Number:
- Early Career Award Program; AC05-76RL01830; P2EZP2-17848; ATG-1549579
- Resource Type:
- Published Article
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems
- Additional Journal Information:
- Journal Name: Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems Journal Volume: 11 Journal Issue: 8; Journal ID: ISSN 1942-2466
- Publisher:
- American Geophysical Union (AGU)
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
- Subject:
- 54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES; high clouds; convective life cycle; anvil cloud; radiative effects; tropical cirrus; circulation
Citation Formats
Gasparini, Blaž, Blossey, Peter N., Hartmann, Dennis L., Lin, Guangxing, and Fan, Jiwen. What Drives the Life Cycle of Tropical Anvil Clouds?. United States: N. p., 2019.
Web. doi:10.1029/2019MS001736.
Gasparini, Blaž, Blossey, Peter N., Hartmann, Dennis L., Lin, Guangxing, & Fan, Jiwen. What Drives the Life Cycle of Tropical Anvil Clouds?. United States. https://doi.org/10.1029/2019MS001736
Gasparini, Blaž, Blossey, Peter N., Hartmann, Dennis L., Lin, Guangxing, and Fan, Jiwen. Tue .
"What Drives the Life Cycle of Tropical Anvil Clouds?". United States. https://doi.org/10.1029/2019MS001736.
@article{osti_1567937,
title = {What Drives the Life Cycle of Tropical Anvil Clouds?},
author = {Gasparini, Blaž and Blossey, Peter N. and Hartmann, Dennis L. and Lin, Guangxing and Fan, Jiwen},
abstractNote = {The net radiative effects of tropical clouds are determined by the evolution of thick, freshly detrained anvil clouds into thin anvil clouds. Thick anvil clouds reduce Earth's energy balance and cool the climate, while thin anvil clouds warm the climate. To determine role of these clouds in climate change we need to understand how interactions of their micro- and macrophysical properties control their radiative properties. We explore anvil cloud evolution using a cloud resolving model in three simulation setups of increasing complexity to disentangle the impacts of the various components of diabatic heating and their interaction with cloud-scale motions.The first phase of evolution and rapid cloud spreading is dominated by latent heating within convective updrafts. After the convective detrainment stops, most of the spreading and thinning of the anvil cloud is driven by cloud radiative processes and latent heating. The combination of radiative cooling at cloud top, latent cooling due to sublimation at cloud base, latent heating due to deposition and radiative heating in between leads to a sandwich-like, cooling-heating-cooling structure. The heating sandwich promotes the development of two within-anvil convective layers and a double cell circulation, dominated by strong outflow at 12 km altitude with in flow above and below. Our study reveals how small-scale processes including convective, microphysical processes, latent and radiative heating interact within the anvil cloud system. The absence or a different representation of only one component results in a significantly different cloud evolution with large impacts on cloud radiative effects.},
doi = {10.1029/2019MS001736},
journal = {Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems},
number = 8,
volume = 11,
place = {United States},
year = {2019},
month = {8}
}
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