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Comparisons of a Cloud Resolving Model and ARM Data

Posselt, D., Mecikalski, J., Tanamachi, R., Feltz, W.F., Turner, D.D., Tobin, D., Knuteson, R.O., and Revercomb, H.E., University of Wisconsin - Madison
Twelfth Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Science Team Meeting

CIMSS/SSEC at the University of Wisconsin is currently running version 3.5 of the PSU/NCAR MM5 once per day at a resolution of 4 km over the ARM CART site domain. Simulations are performed using a sophisticated cloud-resolving microphysics scheme (Reisner 1998) and a radiative parameterization based on RRTM (Mlawer 1997). With selection of appropriate case studies, comparisons of the model output to ARM data can be used to evaluate the model's ability to reproduce boundary-layer thermal and mosture structures, clouds, and downwelling radiation. In this poster, preliminary results from comparisons of MM5 model runs to ARM data are presented for several hand-selected case studies. AERI profiles from each case are shown to be in close agreement with RUC2 analyses, and all cases exhibit abrupt temporal changes in atmospheric state and boundary-layer structure. In the first of two comparison methods, AERI profiles and data derived from other ARM CART-site instruments are used to construct a best estimate of the evolution of the clouds and atmospheric state. This dataset is then compared to several MM5 simulations, each with a different boundary-layer parameterization scheme. These comparisons are evaluated, and used to assess the interaction between different boundary layer schemes and other physical parameterizations in the model. In the second comparison, MM5-derived temperature and water vapor profiles and cloud properties are used to drive an LBLRTM/DISORT calculation of downwelling spectral radiance at locations corresponding to the ARM Central Facility and the four Boundary Facilities. These radiance calculations are compared to coincident AERI observations and evaluated with respect to the model representation of clouds and downwelling radiation.

Note: This is the poster abstract presented at the meeting; an extended version was not provided by the author(s).