Aerosol effects on deep convection in a multi-scale aerosol-climate model

Aerosols have been demonstrated to affect convective clouds and precipitation in observations, process models, and regional climate models. However, examining aerosol effects on convective clouds and precipitation in global climate models has been extremely challenging, as until recently the treatments in the few global climate models that include aerosol effects on convective clouds have used conventional cumulus parameterizations and hence have been quite crude. We have recently built a multi-scale aerosol-climate model, PNNL-MMF, which is an extension of a multi-scale modeling framework (MMF) model. The extended model explicitly treats aerosol effects on deep convection using a two-moment cloud microphysics scheme in the cloud-resolving model component of the MMF. In this presentation, we examine aerosol effects on convective clouds at the global scale using the PNNL-MMF model. Our results show that the frequency of precipitation occurrence at a given liquid water path increases with increasing aerosol loading for deep clouds with surface precipitation rate larger than 10 mm/day. This relationship is particularly evident during the summer time, when convection activity is strong, and may indicate invigoration of deep convection by aerosols. The modeled relationship of aerosols, clouds and precipitation is further compared with observations from the ARM long-term sites (e.g., SGP). The causes of the modeled relationship of aerosols, clouds and precipitations are examined by using a pair of 5-year MMF simulations with and without anthropogenic aerosols.