Improved Low-cloud Simulation from the Community Atmosphere Model with an Advanced Third-order Turbulence Closure

This presentation describes the implementation and testing of an advanced third-order turbulence closure, an intermediately-prognostic higher-order turbulence closure (IPHOC), into the Community Atmosphere Model version 5 (CAM5). The third-order turbulence closure introduces a joint double-Gaussian distribution of liquid water potential temperature, total water mixing ratio, and vertical velocity to represent the subgrid scale variations including skewed turbulence circulations. The distribution is inferred from the first-, second-, and third-order moments of the variables given above and is used to diagnose cloud fraction and grid-mean liquid water mixing ratio, as well as the buoyancy term and fourth-order terms in the equations describing the evolution of the second- and third-order moments. In addition, a diagnostic planetary boundary layer (PBL) height approach has been incorporated in IPHOC in order to resolve the strong inversion above PBL for the coarse general circulation model (GCM) vertical grid-spacing. The IPHOC replaces PBL, shallow convection, and cloud macrophysics parameterizations in CAM5. The coupling of CAM5 with IPHOC (CAM5-IP) represents a more unified treatment of boundary layer and shallow convective processes. Results from global climate simulations are presented and suggest that CAM5-IP can provide a better treatment of boundary layer clouds and processes when compared to CAM5. The global annual mean low cloud fraction and precipitation are compared among CAM5, CAM5-IP, and a multi-scale modeling framework model with IPHOC (MMF-IP). The low cloud amounts near the west coast of the subtropical continents are well produced in CAM5-IP and are more abundant than in other two models. The global mean liquid water path is the closest to the SSM/I observation. The cloud structures from CAM5-IP, represented by the cloud fraction and cloud water content at 15°S transect, compare well with the CloudSat/CALIPSO observations. The shallow cumulus clouds from the standard CAM5 are shallower and have less liquid, while those from MMF-IP are deeper and have more liquid than from the CloudSat/CALIPSO observations. Interpretations of these results will be provided at the meeting.