Identification

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 of 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.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d70v8grf

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2018-12-01T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact