Single-column modeling of shallow clouds for the development of the adaptive vertical grid for E3SM-FIVE

The Framework for Improvement by Vertical Enhancement (FIVE) has been proposed as a promising approach to improve the representation of shallow clouds in the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) through the computation of vertically enhanced physics (VEP) on high resolution vertical grids. It has been shown that E3SM global simulation with enhanced vertical resolution produces results in better agreement with satellite data than does standard resolution. The improvement comes from not only the column-wise differences in the cloud properties due to the enhanced vertical resolution, but also the global propagation of these differences. Ideally, the location and configurations of the VEP grids should adapt to the simulated atmospheric state to achieve a balance between improved model performance and computational cost. This requires an a priori estimate of the responses of cloud properties to changes in temporal and vertical resolutions and the atmospheric states alone. The E3SM single-column model (SCM) provides an option to exclude the interaction between model columns. We used the E3SM SCM to replay the columns and time periods from an E3SM global simulation with standard configurations. We also used it to simulate the same columns and time periods at higher temporal and vertical resolutions. Preliminary results show that a good portion of the difference in cloud fields between global simulations with standard and enhanced vertical resolution is captured by SCM simulations. In this work, we report on the statistical relationships between the differences in the cloud properties at standard and high spatiotemporal resolutions and the atmospheric state at various temporal scales. We use both more traditional and modern statistical methods.